SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

Business Object is truly a scalable and complete business intelligence solution for larger organizations. We have made use of the following components: Live Office, Xcelsius, Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence. We extensively use the publication features of Crystal Reports and scheduling features of Web Intelligence. For an organization that uses Excel extensively, the Live Office direct connect is fast, accurate and user friendly. Be sure to have some super users in the business who can develop Crystal Reports and well as Web Intelligence ad hoc queries. This will make the life of the IT developers and administrative employees much easier. Overall, with past experiences, I would have to rate our opinion of BOBJ very highly.

On the downside, we have had some challenges with upgrades. Be sure to fully test every aspect in your development environment before applying any patches or service packs to Business Objects production servers. SAP was quick to respond to issues, but this still caused problems for users. The bugs we found were deep into software features (displaying column headings, formula logic, etc) and weren’t something we found in our extensive testing. I do admit we pushed the limits and had a lot of custom coding, but we expected these features to work and not break in future releases.

We are using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for a lot of things, such as simple reports and business dashboards, and in all the business areas, for example, finance, sales, and purchasing.

The most valuable feature we have found to be the SAP BW, which is a warehouse tool. Additionally, it is an easy tool to use.

The dashboard tool is called Lumira and it is very uncomfortable for developers to use. They should improve this in the future.

I have been using the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for approximately five years.

The stability is good. However, the performance could be better.

We have several hundred end-users using this solution and we use the solution on a daily basis.

The solution is scalable. We feel comfortable with the infrastructure that we have, but we can expand if we want to. 

The technical support is good, I am satisfied.

I previously use Oracle BI. I think the Oracle BI is stronger and has more functionality than SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. However, it does not connect to SAP ERP which is a disadvantage.

The initial setup is simple, it took us two days to complete.

The implementation, maintenance, and updates can be done by staff within the company. There are times we have used local support or integrators in our area.

This solution is not meant to be very complicated, solutions that are complicated require other tools.

I rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform a seven out of ten.

On-premises

Ease of report development is a key feature. Also, installation is largely automated. The nicest part of BOE remains the semantic layer (Designer), giving developers a powerful way to encapsulate business logic and push it out to users through Webi or WRC.

Because I am primarily an installation and configuration architect working independently through a separate company, the product itself doesn't necessarily affect us in a BI sense. That's really the big-picture issue within our community; that companies often misunderstand how BI is supposed to work and that in order for the business to really participate, there needs to be sufficient training and the cultivation of a "culture of BI".

I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement. Most of the other parts of the tool are fairly easy to get going and it would help getting user buy-in if they could extend that across the entire platform.

Like we always say, the tool is only as good as the person using it. But SAP sort of dropped the ball with their 4.x release, leaving out features that we had become used to with 3.1, which was stable.

We started with Crystal Enterprise 10 eleven years ago, transitioning through BOBJ R2, XI and now 4.x.

BOE 4.2 is currently pretty stable in our experience and we already know that it can scale to any level. The only downside to that is cost.

My personal experience with the SAP engineers is that they are very supportive and develop personal connections easily.

Depending on whether you are doing a simple, one-machine install (single-stack) or clustering according to the sizing recommendations from SAP, it can go from easy to more difficult. But the process is thoroughly documented.

We are more or less the vendor team for our clients.

Always determine your prerequisites before you kick off remotely or onsite. It can save a lot of grief. Have a detailed SOW and project plan that you adhere to as much as possible, but be flexible.

We are operating in the Electronic Health Record space using Epic and BOE for reporting. Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard.

I've evaluated other visualization tools, but BOE still has the best out-of-the-box enterprise security.

Planning is critical.

Our primary use case for this solution is business enterprise reporting. 

The most valuable SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform feature are metadata service layers. To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user. The end user can then use this data to create a report, dashboard, or whatever else.

It also has scheduling and can generate BI content for you. 

Their WebGUI presentation layer could be improved. They are still a little bit behind, for example, Tableau and QlikView.

I have been using this solution for about nine years. 

The features SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform provides are fairly stable. I only noticed one data error in the past.

Of course, the platform uses a lot of Java technologies so the performance and system-level management are tricky because it needs a lot of resources.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is fairly scalable. You can either scale it up or create a cluster. They do have load balance and we have a cluster for important stuff. However, we use it relatively lightly, so we never have performance issues when we needed to scale up or scale out. Mostly, we have to scale up to give it enough RAM.

Currently, we have a couple hundred people using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform at our institution. 

The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform we use are not too advanced so we haven't had much need to contact tech support. When we run into an issue, we can usually solve it through community answers. We have had some SAP technical support come in a few times and every time we met with them we had a good experience. We have a fairly good relationship with their tech support. 

Just before switching to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, we were using QlikView. 

The initial setup was was not bad, but it was relatively complex. It did take some time to get it to work for us. 

I don't have the exact number, but SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is not too cheap. 

My advice is to try to truly understand the system. It is fairly complicated. To get this system to work, you need a systems engineer and an architect in addition to a lot of other people who understand what's going on behind the scenes. 

Management reporting and also some ad-hoc reporting.

During the first of the 10 years we used it, it was a very valuable reporting product. It really is the only product we have for reporting out of the data warehouse that we have. It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources.

SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that.

In addition, we would definitely like to be able, through the tool, to show more metadata, and access a data dictionary directly from the tool.

Also, a user should see data lineage, because we have found out that the abstraction being done in the Universes is sometimes too much for the more specific kind of users. They want to see the origin of the data.

More than five years.

Stability is perfect.

Scalability is also very good.

We have not used technical support directly. We have a local specialist that we go to. It's easier.

The company implemented BusinessObjects 10 years ago. At that time, it was the best product on the market. A lot of things have changed in 10 years.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, if we're talking about a reporting tool, is the ease of use for the end-user as well as integration with other tools, like data dictionaries and data catalogs. That would make the underlying data more visible to the end-user. And, of course, price is important.

Look at who will be your end-user group. Who is going to use the tool?

I would rate this solution at seven out of 10. Seen from the administrative and compliance point of view, it's an excellent tool for an enterprise. But I can't give it any more than that because the user interface for the average user is not very intuitive. You need too much training before you're able to use the tool effectively.

The dynamic scheduling and the user interactive features (input controls, drill down and drill up features) as well as the ability to export the reports to Excel or PDF are some of the best features.

Web Intelligence has allowed our company to move to a self-service delivery model by allowing our internal clients to access, run and schedule reports dynamically without intervention of the BI team.

The dynamic scheduling capabilities, the performance and ability to handle large data sets when connected via BICS to a BW warehouse needs a lot of work. The BW safety belt severely limits the performance of data through the DSL Bridge which makes Web Intelligence appear slow and unable to handle large data sets.

I have used SAP Business Objects for 4 years. I have used both the BICS direct connection to a SAP BW warehouse, as well as connecting to a Universe.

No issues with deployment that I, as a functional user, was aware of.

Stability seems to be an ongoing issue with the tool and as much as that could be attributed to the tool, it can also be attributed to the configuration including the BICS connection, the DSL Bridge, and the tomcat server that it is installed on.

I joined after it was implemented.

We primarily use the product for reporting and dashboards. We only have those two use cases, although there are other ways to use them.

I have a 24-hour company, and the business layer on top of the database can translate database data into business language so that people can easily understand what's happening. It allows us to quickly create reports without IT or programming skills.

The stability is quite good.

According to our experience, SAP BO is too heavy and very difficult for customers with medium, or smaller-sized businesses to install and maintain. It is such a heavy reporting tool.

Even though they provide the business layer, it's difficult for the programmer to create their own business layer. It's too complex for them. They need to simplify this.

The user interface should be easier to use and navigate.

The initial setup is difficult. 

Technical support could be more responsive. 

I've been using the solution for five years already. I've used it for quite a while. 

The stability is pretty good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good. 

We only have three or four people who are using the solution at our company at this time. They are the admins and the ones who generate the reports for us. 

We haven't really looked into scaling as the data volume is very limited. I can't speak to how easy it is to expand or how well it handles extremely large data sets.

Technical support could be better. We tried to get them to help us with the implementation, and they were not quick to respond.

We currently also work with Crystal Reports, which is dated, and Jasper, which is also not that great of a product.

When we began to switch to SAP, we really wanted customization capabilities and we wanted the business layer. We needed something to provide a middle layer or translation layer so that people can generate reports much quicker, and, at the time, SAP was a good option.

The initial setup is not easy. We need a very experienced developer and they need to get enough training from SAP in order to be able to do anything effectively. It's not like other reporting tools that are really easy to use or easy to install and maintain. This one is complex and takes work and inside knowledge. 

There isn't too much maintenance required. You just need to update it every once in a while. 

We needed some help implementing the solution, however, in the end, we weren't completely satisfied as the level of response time was slow. 

I cannot speak to the exact cost of the product, as it's not an aspect of the solution I handle. 

We're currently looking at Power BI and Splunk among other options.

We are SAP partners. 

I use the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend the product to others. Even now, for ourselves, we are looking into an alternative option. 

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten.

On-premises

• Way of creating reports
• Ease of use
• Can connect to any database
• Create models with ease.

In our organization, they chose this product mainly due to its ease of use. They were also able to generate high revenue by identifying their backlog areas.

The calculation engine requires some improvement.

For eight years.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

A 10 out of 10.

I would say it's mostly straightforward, because it has a wide range of compatible operating systems and also it was easy to install. The whole software is bundled and provided to the consumer.

It's the best product in the market when it comes to reporting technology.