We performed a comparison between SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and SAS Visual Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities."
"The reports are most valuable. If it is a single-source universe, based on only one database, the performance, and the reporting tool is user-friendly, and users are very familiar with the tool and are comfortable using it."
"The common metadata environment means that the entire organisation has the same definition of core measures rather than these being derived in spreadsheets or specific reports."
"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"The reporting features the solution offers are excellent."
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"Quick deployment to dashboards and analytics features (using SAS Visual Statistics and Enterprise Guide). Easy to create a simple forecast and discover business insights using segmentation tools."
"It integrates well with SAS, making it simple and quick for developers."
"Visual Analytics is very easy to use. I use Visual Analytics for all the typical use cases except text mining. I used it to analyze data and monitor statistics, not text mining. I also use it for data visualization as well as creating interactive dashboards and infographics."
"It provided the capability to visualize a bunch of data in an organized way."
"It's a stable, reliable product."
"It's quite easy to learn and to progress with SAS from an end-user perspective."
"The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed."
"What I really love about the software is that I have never struggled in implementing it for complex business requirements. It is good for highly sophisticated and specialized statistics in the areas that some people tend to call artificial intelligence. It is used for everything that involves visual presentation and analysis of highly sophisticated statistics for forecasting and other purposes."
"The solution can improve by having more analytical features."
"The biggest area for improvement would be the dashboarding capabilities due to the recent change from Xcelsius to Dashboard Designer. This has created a gigantic ripple in many companies because the skill sets required are drastically different."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"It is limited for us because SAP is shifting toward the cloud, and we can't use a cloud solution for SAP BusinessObjects. SAP introduced a product called PlusTimes one or two years ago and another one that I believe was called Automatic BI. This tool is more powerful than BusinessObjects and other tools because it's provided in the cloud."
"This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user."
"The interface could be slicker and more user-friendly."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
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"The installation process can be a bit complex."
"There are scalability issues. It depends on the data volume and number of end-users. VA requires a lot of hardware resources to move volumes of data."
"The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good."
"A bit more flexibility in the temperatization will be helpful."
"There is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting which can be intimidating."
"In Brazil, there are few documents, courses, and other resources for studying and implementing the tool."
"There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else."
"It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView."
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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 103 reviews while SAS Visual Analytics is ranked 8th in Data Visualization with 35 reviews. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8, while SAS Visual Analytics is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Web intelligence will work with any amount of data even if you have 10 million rows". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAS Visual Analytics writes "Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations". SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos and Angles Professional, whereas SAS Visual Analytics is most compared with Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Databricks and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio. See our SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. SAS Visual Analytics report.
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Thank you everyone for your very helpful comments and expertise! We own BOBJ Lumira and will be researching more about Predictive Analytics features that it claims to offer. We will be doing more thorough analysis of business requirements and prototypes to make the decision.
Even though I am not an expert (and really know very little ) in SAS and SAP BOBJ, I wanted to give you a reply.
From my experience, if you are big on SAP BOBJ an BW, I would keep that and complement with an analytics db, built for the purpose of predictive models.
It is difficult to have one solution that will satisfy everyone, or a single product that excels at everything.
To replace BOBJ/BW with a new solution would be a very risky project, time and cost consuming, lots of expectations. Moreover, there will be enemies around trying to boicot the project. I would foster a new initiative to build an analytical repository, with the best tools to support a business initiative, and the results from that repository I would bring to your BI/Reporting solution (BOBJ).
Hope my comments are of any help to you.
Best regards
Marco
I agree with Director461.
Elisabete Miranda
Comparing SAS VA to SAP BOBJ is like apples and oranges, these products are from different categories, although there is indeed some overlap. SAP BOBJ is a classic enterprise BI platform whereas SAS VA is a specialty product for advanced analytics and data visualization. The products are actually complimentary, much like traditional SAS which often co-exists with enterprise BI tools.
So it all depends on your requirements as well as user expertise. If you need reporting, OLAP and dashboarding then you need SAP BOBJ or a similar platform like MicroStrategy (which we use). If you’re targeting professional data analysts that need to conduct sophisticated modeling and build fancy visualizations then you need SAS VA.
That is correct, SAS offers statistical and predictive analytics, more tuned for individual data scientist as a desktop user.
BOBJ on the other hand is well tuned for ad hoc and operational reporting, geared for IT to design and publish such reports for business users to consume.
Tool selection is very dependent on your business requirements and the audience. If your business users are not statistical function savvy and do not see value yet to make business decisions based on predictive and statistical models, SAS may not be the right tool for now.
Tool adoption is key for the success of a BI implementation.
Good luck and let me know if you need deeper understanding on tool selection.
Krish.
"We are considering SAS VA on top of HADOOP YARN platform. "
I think that would be an interesting combination. I hear HADOOP all the
time in the BI world. I have some experience in Cassandra but not HADOOP.
"What does SAS VA offer that BOBJ would not, and how can we build a
business case around SAS VA specifically?"
SAS is the market leader in BI market and specifically strong in analytic
area as you have already stated. The second area I would look at is the
data model which is the bridge between data store and analytic tools: how
efficient to construct flexible data models to plug to the algorithms,
third the performance of data retrieval which is significantly important in
production stage.
"Based on what I read so far, SAS VA offers a lot more capability in terms
of statistical analytics, predictive analytics and optimization – something
that BOBJ does not appear to have. Does that seem to be the main
differentiating factor?"
I don't have experience in SAS VA, therefore I cannot comment on it. IMHO,
algorithms are easy to add to a product suite, what makes the major factor
is how smooth and easy to flow data to the algorithms (data model).
Another part I would look at is the presentation layer, how easy report can
be created and intuitive to the business user to create report by
themselves.
I believe SAP VA have their own data storage, the comparison of data
storage should be consider as well such as scale out, efficiency... etc.
Regards,
Ray
People going to SAS must ask themselves first do they have any data scientists to implement the software. It is a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for statistics for good reasons but to utilise its capacities you must have the appropriate staff to implement it.
You cannot compare SAS to BOBJ in reality as they are diiferent Tools. Indeed SAP now have their own statistic software called SAP Predictive Analysis which now competes directly against SAS. This Tool which came from the KXEN purchase, whilst not as mature as SAS at present offers quicker modelling capabitilities meaning it will be easy apply the solution and you do not have to have the specific thoroughbread data scientists in house.
As you are already a SAP Customer you should contact them for further information.
SAP BW are HADOOPS are of course extremely different beasts
Hi
SAS VA is a data discovery tool where business users can primarily do lightweight data mining activites on their own with the help of IT. Be sure that you have placed it right. It s counterpart in the BO world is Lumira which doesnt belong to BO BI Suite, thus paid extra.
We made a data discovery tool evaluation last year, Spotfire came to my mind at first as a DD tool with broad data mining capabilities. Have you evaluated it?
Can the tool seemlessly integrate to your hadoop Platform and perform well?
What are the data mining capabilities needed, who is going to to that business or IT/BI?
What are the front end capabilities, can the (business )users create reasonable dashboards on their own and publish them?
POC passed?
Those are the questions came to my mind
thanks,
Emre