SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

It provides every feature you're looking for to perform OLAP and OLTP-based transactional and analytical reporting.

We've used it for some time now, and it's an SAP product that gets more and more mature with each new upgrade or version.

There are definitely some areas of improvement (i.e. interface, etc.), just as every product needs improvements to meet changing demands over time.

When you test and find a bug, you raise a ticket with SAP - which gets fixed by support either because you don't know how to apply the features or it gets fixed with the next patch from their product development team. Also, apart from this, every quarter service pack enhancements come onto the market.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The reporting is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The WebIntelligence Solution is the name of the reporting solution and it is very powerful. 

The solution offers very good features for broadcasting information or scheduling reports. You can schedule everything and make it very easy to disseminate by sending emails with a PDF or Excel. It's very quick and powerful.  

The solution's user security is extremely effective. You can profile very well. All the users and all the functionality is protected and that includes information and data segregation.

The documentation provided is very, very good. There's so much available, that if you ever run into any issues and need a workaround, you have it right there to guide you.

The solution offers good user management.

The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not so user friendly.

SAP's current strategy consists in keeping the reporting part On premise and delegating the Analytics part to the Cloud. You are therefore involved in a hybrid scenario.

The complete environment setup is pretty complex.

To carry out a real project that presents erp / business data on "Cloud Story Telling" you need more specialist actors who manage issues such as: Analytics and Data architecture, Data source identification, System Compatibility, Connectivity and Security.

These aspects are certainly also required on other vendor BI solutions.

On the SAP front, we are certainly trying to improve and complete the On Premise / Cloud integration, with the latest version SAP BO 4.3.

I've been working with the solution for twenty years now. It's been a very long time. I started using it around 1998.

The solution is very stable, and, on the off chance you have a problem, SAP is very quick to help. There are lots of workarounds if you do run into issues.

You can scale this solution if you need to. It's easy enough to do so.

One of the great things about SAP is the information that is available. When you have a problem, SAP is very quick to give you an answer or solution. You can also Google a lot of workarounds. There's so much documentation online that it's really easy to troubleshoot. That's because if anyone has a problem, SAP notes it and finds a solution which they post.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's pretty complex.

The installation configuring environment is not so easy to work with. Also, the connection of the SAP Analytics Cloud is very complex.  It's not very easy to configure the environment.

The time I need to configure and install the solution is about one week for the BusinessIntelligence Platform solution, On premise. Another week is required for the connectivity aspect and settings of the Cloud (Analytics).

We are working with an older version also well as the latest version of the solution. 

I would recommend this product to other organizations. It's a stable and powerful enterprise solution. Everything from the broadcasting to the scheduling, to the user management and the reporting, is very powerful. 90% of customers end up asking for a solid and consistent reporting solution. In these cases, I definitely suggest SAP Business Objects Platform.

That said, the dashboard isn't the best with this product.  It should be noted that SAP is working on their dashboards offerings in Cloud environment.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis. I found the SAP suite of products powerful. They scale well for enterprise use, i.e., thousands of recipients of the output of the products as dashboards and/or reports.

It gets people off Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and sharing the same reports/dashboards, so departments receive the same figures for KPIs and company performance.

This stopped the waste of time in management meetings, whereby people would spend a lot of time explaining different performance results (different Excel spreadsheets) so they could analyze results and plan to act on the results.

More thorough testing of Service Packs before release.

I have used Webi, Universe Designer, and Dashboards for 12 years. I’ve used Lumira for one year.

We had stability issues, mainly with the integration of the SAP BI products with SAP’s EIM products (Data Services, Information Steward). We had some instability when applying patches and new releases.

There was poor quality of the testing of new functionality introduced in new releases.

We have not really had scalability issues. The readiness of the products for the enterprise was a strong point.

Patchy. Depending on the product with the issue (eg WebI or Information Steward) the responses can be good (WebI) or awful (Information Steward).

Technical support was hit and miss. Sometimes it was good. Other times it was awful. Especially when the problem raised was hard for them to reproduce. They often ask the same questions over and over.

We didn’t have a previous solution. We have pretty much been an SAP BI shop for a long time.

Setup was quite complex due to the number of environments being used (Dev/SIT/UAT/Prod) and the integration between BI and EIM products. It is even harder now that we use SAP HANA.

Implemented in-house.

Make sure you factor in plenty of time for regression testing as the way SAP release Service packs these days there is good (new functionality) and bad (lack of thorough testing) news.

Over the years, we have reviewed other BI products, such as IBM Cognos and Tableau. Some of them are also in use along with the SAP BI products.

Check the number of intended users and which part of BI you are intending to introduce (reporting, analytics, etc.).

Check out the free trial periods and see if there are options to use cloud computing versus installing it in your own data center.

Semantic Layer (Universes), ease of use

New Undelete of Public objects..

New Dashboard of overall environment

Java Applet still relying on the quirkiness of Java VM, and potential version mis-matches.

10+ Years

With proper planning and understanding of the application landscape the deployment is fairly straight forward. Better to do a new install if you have multiple updates and patches...better to build from scratch vs remodel

Highly scalable, new configuration wizard with 4.1 version assists in scaling correctly.

Fair

Fair to Poor..Business Objects sometimes gets lost in the quagmire of SAP

No

Depends on the deployment. Can be very complex in a 100% fail over/fault tolerant/load balanced scenario.

I deploy for clients.

No

Use a consulting firm with expertise in deployment.

SAP Business Objects Data Services is user friendly and easy to learn. It is easy to connect to SAP ECC or SAP BW, and does not require any additional plugins like for the other ETL tools.

Our organization uses SAP BI tools, and Qlikview for building reports for our doctors and other teams. It has helped us to build an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). It helps the BI teams to build reports over this warehouse.

It needs some improvement in its performance. It handles our data great as we do not process much data daily, but we are going to process huge amounts of data. I don't think it can handle well when compared to other ETL tools. I would like to see its data handling improved.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

I think this product is best if we are not loading huge data. Also for its easy to use and learn.

Ability for the user to easily schedule the reports and managing them is a big plus. Most of BOBJ tools are also data source agnostic which makes them versatile across all environments.

WebIntelligence, Analysis for Office, and SAP Lumira were designed for businesses. So the adoption rate by the is very high. Quick intuitive analysis of data, and in just a few clicks WebI and Lumira can Merge Dimensions from different sources.

• Lot of Automation of routine reports. Analysts can now focus on analysis rather than pulling in reports from multiple places.
• Scheduling of the reports makes sure we are not duplicating work across all regions for the same report.
• Brings in standardization.
• Self-Service BI or DIY-BI
• Reports are easily available on Mobile devices

• Reusability of the reports and tables from between the different tools
• Improvements needed in charting
• Direct and easy integrations to easily bring in data from other applications across all the tools like Salesforce, reading RSS streams etc. and not just other databases
• Big data source support across all tools.
• Bringing Predictive Analysis to the main stream

I've been using it for 12+ years, and all the other products since their inception.

We had no major issues.

We had no major issues.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

First level support is generally is good for basic issues. Second level support is informative when it comes to bigger issues.

The BOBJ solution was so ingrained within the organization, and powerful that there was no necessity to change.

It was smooth.

Did both cases. Even if you have an external vendor, make sure you who have an experienced lead in-house who knows how the organization works to guide the implementation team.

ROI is absolute.

SAP has flexible licensing when negotiated correctly.

When deploying SAP BW and BOBJ together, get an experienced practitioner who can educate and implement keeping the business users in mind, not just the deadline and processes of IT.

There are a lot of limitation in SAP BW especially for scheduling, which can limit the full utilization of BOBJ, but there is a solution for it all if you think out of the box.

The solution has been extremely stable. We haven't had any issues so far.

The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all.

Technical support, overall, has been very good and we've been happy with their level of service.

The basic components of the solution could be improved.

The UI could be updated a bit.

I can't think of any features that are currently missing from the product at this time.

We've been using the solution for about seven years at this point. It's been a while. We have a lot of experience with it.

We've found the stability of the solution to be very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

Plenty of users in our organization actually use the solution.

Technical support for the most part has been very good. We've had a positive experience and we are quite satisfied with the level of support they provide to us.

I don't recall the company using a previous solution. As far as I know, the company has only ever really used SAP.

We've found the initial setup to be pretty straightforward. It's not so complex. A company shouldn't have any trouble with the implementation process.

We didn't need any assistance with the integration process. It's a process that I manage as an integration manager.

We pay our licensing fees on a monthly basis. I can't speak to how much they are. I don't recall there being any extra costs above the licensing itself.

We are customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with the organization.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it as a perfect ten. It's been great. For the most part, we have been happy with the product.