SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

We primarily use the solution more for analysis and reporting.

The solution is very easy to use.

We find the product to be very stable. 

The solution is scalable.

SAP does force users to manage it a certain way. specifically around queries, and does not integrate well with other platforms, or lacks a certain level of flexibility. It needs to be more flexible for the end-user.

For example, we have been using Cognos also for years now, however, if a user has to do a query on their own then it doesn't work. That's why we are now gradually trying to migrate to Power BI. And, while it's easy to integrate on the SAP landscape, when it comes to the flexibility for the user to create a report on their own, there isn't really an option to do that. 

I've been dealing with the solution for over ten years at this point. It's been around a decade since I started working with it. It's been a while. 

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

The solution can scale if you need it to as an organization. 

Globally, we have almost 2,000 users on this product.

We are also using Power BI.

When we moved into the SAP landscape we had two choices. We had IBM Cognos and could integrate SAP with Cognos or we go for an SAP solution which is an SAP BI that automatically integrated with SAP ECC. We chose SAP BI. However, now, we are moving more towards Power BI and moving away from SAP.

I did not handle the implementation and therefore cannot speak to the process. I'm not sure if it's easy or difficult. 

We have our own support and architecture teams and they are able to handle any maintenance necessary if it comes up. We generally have five to six people who could handle such tasks. 

We pay for an enterprise license. We pay yearly when we renew our license. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're currently using. What we have is completely on-premise as we are still on ECC. We are using the HANA architecture, and we are still on-premise.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I would recommend the solution to other users and companies. 

In my company, the solution is used when I get involved in scenarios to get more insight into the analytics part before presenting different options to the company's CEO, because of which I stress over those scenarios related to externalities.

I can create and manipulate scenarios, which has helped me a lot because before we started with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, I worked on Excel documents. Excel documents used to get modified by a lot of people in our company, so no one could follow all the patterns when working on the Excel sheet. Within SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, I have been able to follow a path and know who or why modifications were done.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that none of the users can modify a status if I don't allow it.

The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement. The solution's financial area needs to improve because a lot of the segment reports have been working with the finance part, so a lot of projects can be done now that our company couldn't do in the past.

Sometimes, there is a possibility that our company has to share some files with certain external users, and we find it hard to provide them with all the information that they want even after using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement.

The machine learning part in the solution is an area of concern that should be considered for improvement.

I have been using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for three months. I don't remember the version of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I don't use the technical support provided for the solution since I prefer to use the web or the internet to search for information related to the product.

I have programming experience, and now I work on business intelligence tools like Power BI and Tableau.

The initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

Based on my ability to understand the information related to the solution, it does help in providing me with a higher profit. I cannot be exactly sure about the ROI since I don't know the price of the solution.

I recommend those planning to buy the solution to try it for a few days.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten.

It is primarily used for reporting and dashboarding.

The scheduling and publication features are very useful. Additionally, the reporting tool and Lumira dashboard are also quite beneficial.

One area of improvement could be technical support because it is not that great. Specifically, the response time for SAP support is slow.

In the next release, I would like to see additional dashboarding-related features.

I have been using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform since 2008. I have been using it for around 15 years now.

I would give stability a nine out of ten. I haven't faced any major issues with the product. If you have experience with the product, you can increase its performance and scale it up. So it's all about your experience with the product.

I rate the scalability of this solution a nine out of ten.

The customer service and support is slow in response. 

Positive

Since I have been working on it for 15 years, the setup isn't complicated. The deployment depends on the requirements. For example, if the customer wants to go for the clustered box, clustered since being on installation on multiple boxes, then it will take two days, three days, and sometimes five days. But if it is straightforward, then it's in it is a job of four hours.

Standalone, straightforward installation for a small client; it will take four hours for a new installation. And if we want to upgrade it, it will take around two and a half hours.

About three to four developers use the platform, and I am responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting any issues they may encounter. Additionally, we have business analysts and users who utilize the platform to view data.

The license is cheaper, but the support is costlier.

I evaluated different options based on your company's requirements, and some people preferred SAP, while others preferred Tableau. And because SAP BusinessObjects is primarily used for reporting and Tableau for dashboarding, users didn't want to use both products for their respective functions. It ultimately depends on the specific needs of the company and its users.

SAP BusinessObjects is the simplest and most stable reporting product in the market and the best enterprise-level reporting product. Many companies use SAP BusinessObjects, including Apple and Cisco. However, in dashboarding, SAP BusinessObjects is not that stable. Therefore, Tableau, ClickView, and other tools have captured the market. But in terms of reporting, SAP BusinessObjects is the market leader. The reason behind its success is the Symantec layer it provides between the database and the report. It is the only big company like Oracle or Microsoft that can provide this.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an enterprise reporting platform. We use it to read data from the data warehouses and serve the internal usage of the company for reporting purposes.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's most valuable features are it has a great presentation layer. We can develop the presentation layer with drag-and-drop capabilities. For end-users and for our interns in the company can create reports and do their data analysis processes or works by using the objects that we created on the presentation layer by themselves.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform should be made easier for the end-users and the performance could be improved.

In a feature release, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform the visual should improve, such as dashboards. They need to improve the visualization issues. The analytics are a bit behind the sector because alternative tools have integration between other platforms, such as Microsoft Office or Cloud. SAP BusinessObjects is trying to move all the platforms to the cloud, but we couldn't use the cloud and we are in the middle of a division. They don't offer an on-premise solution for the platform.

I have been using the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for approximately 10 years.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is a stable solution.

The scalability of the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is good.

We have approximately 200 power users and 1,000 report users using this solution in my company.

I have used the support from SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform.

I rate the support from SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform a two out of five.

I have not used another solution previously.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is in the middle range of difficulty. It is not easy or complex.

I rate the initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform a four of five.

We have three people who do the maintenance and support of the solution. They are data and BI engineers.

We used a third party for the implementation of the solution.

There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform.

I rate the price of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform a four out of five.

I would advise others the solution has a great presentation layer, but it needs to be managed well before you receive the most out of the performance.

I rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform an eight out of ten.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is currently deployed as on-premise solution and recently the server got hosted into cloud, but it's more or less assembled as on-premise solution.

It was a tool that was established in its current form a very long time back, so most of the uses are familiar. The familiarity is very good with that tool. Since it is familiar, they're able to navigate and get the reports and even share the requirements needed for anything new that needs to be developed. To an extent, they know its features and capabilities. So that's one thing.

It is providing a wide range of reports in different departments. Especially for the department I'm working in, they are mostly interested in the regulation side. So they are looking for the information or properties regarding the products and getting their details on the regulation, which will help them to manage or make sure that all the regulatory standards are maintained for the information captured in the database.

It is more user-friendly and easier to work with the report creation part, creating reports out of an established universe. Maybe a business person could liberate the existing universe and create a report on top of it, as well. So that's one cool feature.

It has additional capabilities like scheduling and getting the reports in the various forms, like through the mails and through the shared locations, and all those sorts of formats, so those features are good. The user friendliness helps create the reports out of the data source available.

It's not like apps. Most of the Apps right now are into dashboarding. This tool, for the Crystal Reports in the phase I'm primarily working on, does not have those dashboarding capabilities, like in the other advanced tools like Power BI or ClickView, and compared to them the dashboard generation is not that great.

But there are other products, like SAP Analytics Cloud, all of which actually provide this information under the Business Intelligence platform. But I have not used it much because my customer has not moved onto those platforms yet. That may be one thing that may need improvement - the dashboarding side. Also sometimes the performance is not that great when getting millions of records out of it. It'll take its own sweet time to get that report refreshed.

Feature-wise, it's a slightly old technology, so I don't expect anything getting updated much in it, rather just continuing with their current thing.

I'm right now using other dashboarding tools for the dashboarding requirements. As I mentioned, it's not that capable of providing the current dashboarding requirements. I was introduced first to this tool then later to others.

I'm using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform in my current project. One of my roles is to develop the reports and universes, so I'm currently using it for that.

On the backside, there is not much that needs to get fixed. Occasionally we used to figure out some bugs with the versions, mostly compatibility issues with the latest databases, for example with Snowflakes. But we used to get the patches for that compatibility issues. But so far I haven't seen those sorts of issues in the environment that I'm working in.

In terms of the maintenance, we have seen some server slowness or shutdowns or something like that. We have noticed it, but not much on the admin side of activities. But if we see some issues in the system then we usually reach out to SAP to see their point of view and they may be coming with a fix for it or with a solution to adjust the system parameters.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is not that scalable. I will say the scalability is medium. It's not as easy to scale it up as we need it to deploy. We have an option to cluster it with multiple servers, but it's not like it's just a configuration change. It should be repeating the process of the entire installation in a different box, and linking those up.

It is being widely used and we have people from various departments and roles. It is covering some of the finance reports and it covers from the financial side. On the VP level, they are getting some sales reports and other data, with daily refreshes on it. It is used by the analyst for day-to-day activities. It is widely used. I cannot pinpoint one specific use we set for it for the current client I'm working for.

Maybe I'm planning to increase usage. The BI platform has different components in it. The current components I'm using are mostly the Web Intelligence and the Crystal Reports. I feel like it's a little outdated, it's a little more like old technology. But under that they have an SAP Analytics Cloud platform that they're building up under the Business Intelligence itself. I guess eventually the roadmap will be inclined to that solution.

We usually use both the forum and the support group for SAP. As I mentioned, if there are some serious issues, we are in contact with SAP, so we'll raise tech issues with them and they will come back with a fix, like connectivity to a new database. And if there are any ongoing issues that we identify in our landscape which need to be addressed, they usually get back with the fix or they usually analyze our system and give us suggestions.

We also interact with the forum. The blog forums and the social forums for this product are well established. We will get most, 60% to 70% of queries, addressed in those forums. I have observed most of the very similar issues already registered in those forum, which will be helpful for debugging or solving our issues.

Occasionally we may have to do multiple follow-ups for a product with tech support and get them to understand and then have a debate to get it fixed. That's little challenging. It'll take some time since maybe our issues are specific to a landscape, the way that we operate with this huge, massive amount of records. So at times they may not be easily open, but with more proof and if we can provide more justification, they usually pick it up. But it's not very fast, it will take some time.

The deployment process is quite easy. We have a dedicated admin team to manage the queues of deployment. It is very easy to get that once we deploy the changes in dev, it can be easily moved across environments to different test environments and to the cloud. It also has the capability to roll back the changes if there are any issues that we identify, so I don't see any issues with the deployment process.

To set it up, provided we have all the infra support needed, it will mostly be handled by different teams, like database. From that perspective, maybe a couple of teams may be involved as repositories are mounted on top of database, but the installation side can be handled by one person. That can be possible if it is a small scale deployment with not too many clusters involved.

But if there are cluster servers and multiple servers needed to be deployed and linked, it may be worth having a considerable effort to deploy this solution. I'm mostly talking about the installation of the product. But it can be handled with a couple of people, provided we have the support from the infra team with the servers, with required specification for the server, as well as any other support needed, including admin support for the servers.

If it is standalone, a simple server installation can be completed in a day or two.

It is very widely used across different departments and it definitely serves a purpose to give insights on the data. It is surely giving the returns, but I may not be in a position to give the exact figures or how much it will be in connection with the purchase demand or purchase cost. But it is definitely a tool that is needed for the day-to-day tracking.

I think the licensing depends upon the user base. If it is a limited license, the user base has some restrictions. If we need to expand our user base, I guess there needs to be enhanced licensing. At a high level I can share that, but we haven't faced it as we have the full premium license with them, but I know the starter packages are limited on the number of users. Maybe not for all licensing, but only the lowest range licensing fee may have some limitation on the number of concurrent users.

My advice to anyone considering SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is to keep an eye on the requirement side that they need. If you are looking for a flashy dashboard with a lot of user interactions with click and dicing the graphs, I don't recommend the Business Intelligence component or the Crystal Reports. They may have to look into other products.

On a scale of one to then, I would say SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is a 7.

We are only using the dashboards and promoting the self-service BI features. the usage is limited just to visualization. We integrated dashboards for monitoring KPIs. sending SMS' is used based on threshold in few dashboards. Otherwise, it's more used for visualization and not data mining because it requires some licenses that we didn't buy.

Currently we are working with the Web Intelligence on premise but we don't have a lot of features. We would like to get some more features related to predictive analytics. We are just using dashboards and monitoring KPIs on top of our data warehouse.

The features that I have found most valuable are that we are able to build all repositories needed and provide our business users with self-service BI. We are building a repository on top of our data warehouse and building all the dashboards and KPIs.

Sometimes, when monitoring our network or monitoring the KPIs, if we have something drop lower than a threshold, an email or an SMS will go out. We are using these features, but we are not using predictive modeling, clustering, or data mining. We don't have those.

In terms of what could be improved, it would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did (I manage Oracle, as well), because I like that feature with Oracle.

I would like them to implement analytics the same as Oracle does and have the machine learning model within their Web Intelligence.

I have been using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform since 2005.

It is a very stable solution and it works well.

It doesn't work in memory, only on the server side. We are not taking this benefit, but it's very stable and it's answering the need.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's scalability is based on the need and it's not scalable based on Alfa's needs, which I believe, from a data warehouse perspective, the data is around 12 terabytes. We are not talking about petabytes.

We have 25 end users using it.

We have users from the customer experience department, the marketing department, from customer service, from finance, from budgeting, and we have the chief also working on it.

I am not so satisfied with the technical support because I am opening cases but it's taking too much time.

We previously tried to work on Power BI and on Microsoft SharePoint. But with Power BI, there are a lot of limitations. Its visualization is very good, but you have a lot of limitations, and it uses a lot of memory. It does not provide efficiency and scalability when we are talking about a high volume of data. When you are talking about simple reports, it's very good and its visualization is great, but sometimes business users are in need of answering complex questions, so here SAP was better for me.

The initial setup was not that straightforward, but we were able to manage.

We have a lot of server process and configuration, plus the agents and everything. So from an administrative perspective, it is complex, but we were able to manage because of our technical expertise.

Because we did it internally, I believe it took us two to three months.

We got the environment ready, then the repository, it was packaged by phases and by project.

We launched an RFP related to an enterprise data warehouse, then we split this RFP in phases, with data integration, data modeling and then the BI. During the BI part, we used an implementation strategy to try to implement it.

We have an on-premise license. We have one license for an admin and we have a license for our users, enough for 27 user licenses. We pay on a yearly basis. We are selling support, but as I said, we are using only the Web Intelligence and the dashboards. We didn't buy the other models or feature. We don't have the predictive analytics or the SAP HANA. We don't have any of that.

The servers and the preparation to go on the servers are costs beyond the licensing fees.

We checked Oracle. It used to be OBIEE back then, and in 2010 and 2005 it was not as good as today. Now, Oracle has worked a lot on their product, especially with Oracle Analytic Server. But back then, when we made the decision, it was Oracle OBIEE and it was very limited. It had bad dashboards, they were not appealing to the end users.

SAP is a stable solution, but you need to have multi-experts to be able to maintain it.

The biggest console that we implemented is using SAP as a self-service BI. It is an incentive for business users and different stakeholders, to be able to use the self-service BI and answer their questions instantly. This is conditioning that we as IT are using the right models, the right repository, and requiring all the data for them.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform an eight.

We use it almost exclusively for our analytics for the Epic environment. So, a lot of healthcare-related reporting and financial reporting is done on it. It is not geared towards the operational world. It is geared towards the analytical world where we're looking at a month of data, a year of data, or a quarter of data.

We try to use its current version.

On the first of the month, when we get ready to close the books, we run a lot of analytics through the BI platform. The analytics are available to our financial team within 10 hours, and we typically run around 21,000 jobs at the beginning of every month. We schedule them, and they get downloaded as CSVs and then people consume them.

I like the fact that we can integrate it seamlessly within our Epic environment, but probably the best thing that Crystal Reports offers is the ability to do visualizations. They're simple to do, and they're catchy. So, it is a really great tool.

It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. So, it allows you to do server-side joins instead of pulling all the data into Crystal Report to aggregate that data. It has great visualization. For the most part, it operates quite efficiently.

It is a really solid product. It has been out there for some time, and it gives you exactly what you need.

We're an Epic shop, and Epic is moving away from Crystal. It would be nice if it had tighter integration with products like Epic. It would be awesome to have better integration with third-party products.

They could reduce the licensing expenses. There is nothing really wrong with the product in terms of what it does. It works well. If you are a part of BI Launch Pad, then you could run ad hoc reporting, but for the integration, you need access to BI Launch Pad, which is quite expensive. We're an organization with 18,000 employees. It is not really practical to give people access to BI Launch Pad. So, from a customer perspective, in terms of saturating our employee base, we don't really have great saturation because of the expense. 

I have been probably using it for close to eight years.

It has been a solid product. We have had no issues. Any issues that we had were self-inflicted. They were not consequences of the product.

We run around 21,000 reports at the beginning of every month, and we get them done in 10 hours. These are not operational reports. These are analytics reports. Some of those reports pull a year's worth of data, aggregate that data, and then spit it out with visualizations and everything else. So, it operates efficiently.

We're a healthcare system in Dallas, Texas. We have 11 hospitals. A vast majority of the leaders, probably more than 2,000 leaders, use the results of the products we create from Crystal Reports, etc. A significant amount of the other staff also uses the results. Our finance team uses it almost exclusively to generate their data. We have probably more than 18,000 people working through our facilities, and probably half of them in some fashion or another touch the SAP environment at some point during the course of a month. So, it is being used extensively. We rely on this product.

We don't call SAP directly. We work through Epic. Our licensing with SAP is through Epic. So, Epic has a direct relationship with SAP, not us.

I have used other products, but my company hasn't really used any other product or any big data solution like this.

It is pretty straightforward. We had no complications at all in installing it. We had some complications getting it to work with Epic, but once it was set up, it has been sitting there and doing its thing. We don't ever have to mess with it. It has been a solid product. It just works.

For its implementation, we used a consultant, but he was not associated with SAP. We took the help of a gentleman who was DBA experienced in implementing this product in an Epic environment, but he was not an SAP employee.

For its maintenance, I have one staff member who's the admin of SAP. She has additional duties with the maintenance of this product, which probably takes up 10% of her time.

We purchase licenses through Epic. So, we get an Epic price as opposed to the SAP price. If we were going to use other products like Webi that they offer or exclusively use BI Launch Pad, it would cost a lot because half of our employees would touch it in some fashion. So, we use Epic-Crystal integration to keep the licensing cost down. I believe the BI Launch Pad licensing is something like $800 for each, and the Crystal Report licensing is something like $500 for each, but that's not what we pay.

I would advise others to get somebody who knows what they're doing when they install it. That's what we did. It is a complex product, and trying to fumble through all the bits and pieces and the nuances of it is challenging.

It has been around for years. It has been there ever since I went to software engineering. It does what it does. It is built to do that every year. It just needs to get more efficient at doing it. It just needs better integration with third parties and maybe a price reduction for the licensing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for business intelligence as more people ask for that.

We're a financial business, and this has helped us make important decisions. 

This is the easiest way to gather information and have everything together. We have manipulated the information effectively in the way we want. 

It is a stable product.

The solution can scale. 

The platform should be a bit more user-friendly. There should be an easier way to use the solution.

I've used the solution for about half of a year. I have not used it for that long just yet.

I'd rate stability ten out of ten.

The scalability is good. I'd rate scalability eight out of ten. 

We have around 50 users using the solution at this time. 

Likely, we will increase usage in the future. 

I've never contacted technical support. I do not know how helpful or responsive they are in general. 

I'm not sure about the initial setup. I wasn't a part of the deployment process. 

I am not familiar with the pricing of the solution. 

We have used the latest version of the solution. However, I don't know the exact version number. 

New users need to understand a bit about business intelligence in order to prove the usefulness of the solution. You also need to have an idea of what you'd like to get out of the solution, and that should be decided at the outset.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.