SAP Data Services Reviews

Connectivity with SAP and low impact on SAP environments. Also overall stability of the product.

Kellogg (the company I work for) used this product for data migration into the new SAP environment that we have established for North America. We also used the tool during the Pringles acquisition.

Matching Transforms are quite complex.

5 years.

No issues that would impact our timelines.

Data Services is extremely stable and stability information steward is considerably higher in version 4.2 than it was at the initial version 4.0.

Easy to scale horizontally or vertically.

Satisfied.

Needs improvement as far as responsiveness.

No.

I was not directly involved at the initial setup.

I heard Kellogg used a combination of SAP and Accenture for the initial setup.

Data Quality has an indirect ROI and we have not derived a fixed number.

Since I was not involved with the initial setup I am not able to answer a question about the start-up cost. As far as day-to-day cost, it is minimal (1/4 FTE) due to its stability.

Depends on the environment. If you are connecting to SAP environment I would recommend involvement of a 3^rd party vendor with experience.

- Its single infrastructure for Data Migration and Data Integration.

- Heterogeneous processing with broad database support.

- Parsing, Standardization and Cleansing the Data.

- Matching and consolidation of records.

- Multi-user support and security with central repository.

- Instant trace-ability with impact analysis and data lineage functionality.

It helps our organization and our clients achieve its goals and objectives by having the right information at the right time and at the right people.

We can standardize business information though data is disparate or came from many sources like flat files (CSVs, Textfiles, Excel files), RDBMS, Application Systems and etc.

With this product you can align your information with the business process and can provide Enterprise Data Warehouse that will suit to your reporting needs.

I think it has a little trouble handling more users running parallel batch jobs in one job server but minimal.

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services 3.1,3.2, 4.0 and 4.1 (SAP) for 5.3 years

Yes but minimal and can be resolve quickly.

None.

None.

4.5 out of 5.

4.5 out of 5.

Yes, because its more dynamic and has so many features.

Straightforward. You just have to follow the guides, check Product Availability Matrix (PAM) and if issues related to sources and targets arise do some research.

Both. 4.7 out of 5.

300%.

You can leverage this product in all your business needs regarding data or information or any business requirements in the systems but first you must find a dedicated consultant or developer for this product and they should also train the people from your organization.

• Data warehousing project (with CDC or comparison table to update our histories).
• Four sources: SQL Server, Oracle, SAP ECC, Excel file.
• One target: Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
• Complex transformation to load the Data Warehouse (good and simple optimization).

• It's very simple to build a data flow.
• The development is faster than SSIS or Talend.
• Impact analysis is very useful to know who used this KPI (the report on the user that had access to this report).
• Profiling data is very useful to know the interesting fields.

• Portability of development (you can change your source/target from Oracle to SQL without changing your code).
• Web console monitoring.
• Auto-documentation.
• Simple toolbox with all you need.

• Development with web tool (today is with client tool).
• Connection to Active Directory to extract user and group.
• A PaaS cloud service (today is on-premise).
• Better connection to SAP BW.

Our primary use is for storing incidents and all of the financial information that accompany them.

We do maintenance on buildings and our customers call if there is a problem. Each time a call comes in we log the incident, solve the problem, and later invoice the customer.

The most valuable feature is the logging capability. We use it for logging incidents.

The interface is not quite user-friendly and is in need of improvement. 

In the next release of this solution, I would like to have a planning tool.

I have been using SAP Data Services for two years.

With respect to stability, we have not had any problems.

We have not had issues with scalability.

We have our own technical support group, so I have not been in contact with SAP for support.

We are currently evaluating ServiceNow to see if it meets our needs and has a better user interface.

This is not a solution I recommend for incident management. SAP works well for the financial side of the business, but for anybody who is researching solutions for incident management, I suggest that they use another product.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The fact that it's built on SQL, makes it easy to write code. Also, the database and the connection are quite smooth. 

The solution lacks user-friendly features. Compared to other integration tools I've used before, it's less user-friendly and the built-in features just aren't sufficient. 

The description of error messages isn't extensive, although they do point out the problems. With other solutions, like Talend, I was able to use the debugger to get directly to the problem, but with SAP Data Services the debugger is not working. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the version specifically, but I'm using it in an enterprise environment and I can't do an upgrade.

The query feature does not allow a lot of flexibility in building the code. They need to make progress with this feature as well.

In future releases, I'd like to see the integration of a big data solution within SAP Data Services. I don't know if they offer that right now. The version I have is quite basic. If I was able to use more data sources with other software, and have the solution be more compliant with more data source types and big data sources, that would be helpful.

I would rate the stability seven out of ten. It's good, but it's not the best.

I wasn't part of the initial setup, so I can't speak directly to the implementation of the solution.

We are using the on-premises version of the solution. We work on the enterprise version and have a few hundred users.

I like the platform. It's quite robust. It's just there are little improvements that could make the solution better, but it's quite a good tool.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

I am Microstrategy BI developer with 6 years experience and with 1 year experience on SAP Data Services.

Out of 5, I would give SAP Data Services technical support a 4.5. The technical support from SAP was quick and technically very clear. The way the issues are being reviewed and the response we receive are great.

The first ETL tool being implemented is SAP Data Services and it was implemented during 2008.

The product was implemented by a third party consulting company. The implementation was good from a technical perspective, but there were few flaws in the business logic which the third party consulting team should have gained from the in-house business analysts.

Since I recently joined a year ago, I am not sure whether any other tool was evaluated along with this ETL tool.

I would advise implementing SAP Data services using a Unix platform rather than a windows platform.

ETL is very useful. We use Data Services not only with data warehouse development but also integration with other 3rd parties and external data.

We have integration with 30 different systems now. Business users manual data-entry load has decreased, and data between different systems are consistent in almost-real time.

We can develop time-based, visualized analyses with our BI platform, and four years ago, business users had to prepare their complex records in Excel every time they needed data reports. Now they only need to refresh reports. On the other hand, business users were only able to query data four years ago, but now their visions are changing and they are now performing data mining and forecast analyses.

Data mining and more visualized reports are the next steps.

We had to deal with data quality problems.

It has inadequate data analysis and data profiling, which has increased testing and user acceptance duration.

BO Web Intelligence, v4.0 is more unstable than XI v3.x. We’ll upgrade to v4.1 in Q3.

No, we did not.

Setup was straightforward, but the customization and implementation process was complex.

We started with a vendor-partner, but now we have in-house team and still get consultancy advice from the partner.

• Cognos
• Microsoft SSIS
• SSRS

First, perform an analysis of your business users' requirements.

The data quality and your data warehouse models are the most important parts of a BI project. Design the model from both business requirements and source data. Make sure you involve business users from the beginning and explain the advantages of business intelligence to the data life-cycle well. Assign a short and attractive name to the web site and/or tool that users can remember easily and will like.

Data migration and data quality.

It offers short development time and pre-built processes.

Ease of development.

Big data, real-time connectivity without the need to use SAP Replication Server

Excellent too

Excellent, you build a network of Job Servers to balanced the execution load

Local teams always available, plus direct support from Walldorf if required

I'm using SAP Data Services since it was an OEM product in Cognos in 1998

Data Services itself, none. The must difficult (kind of) ids to setup the databases connectivity for sources and targets.

In-House

Lower time to put applications in Production

The SAP Data Services EE License has all the additional products for enterprise wide data delivery, like Information Steward, Event Stream Processing, etc.

None, because other products cannot connect to SAP generating ABAP code to access pool and cluster tables