We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos, Oracle OBIEE, and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools.
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"Dashboards provide us with various views and perspectives on our data, allowing us to analyze metrics such as revenue, occupancy rates, etc."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"It's easy to create fully-functional Dashboards."
"Oracle OBIEE is good for data visualization and analytical reporting."
"It mostly supports enterprise level data. We have millions of records on a daily basis."
"Provides good data visualization features, and provides a lot of visualization reports from various data sources."
"The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities."
"It can be used with any type of data models, such as relational lines and dimensional lines."
"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 initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
"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."
"Enables us to present data with Smart Objects that can be embedded within presentations and which automatically update when the presentations are run."
"Has features that can be leveraged to scale out and scale up."
"There are two tools inside BusinessObjects' schematic layout called the Universal Design Tool and Information Design Tool. These are the most powerful tools that set BusinessObjects' reporting from other solutions. If my organization has 300 or 400 tables, I can combine all of them into one universe, and everyone can use that. It is just a schematic layout that does not hold any data but the table relationships."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pros →
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"There are a lot of aspects of Oracle OBIEE that are exceptionally complicated, make things unnecessarily difficult for everyone who uses it. In terms of the integrations, Oracle needs to improve a little more, but I believe that they have tried to capture all those issues. The issues we are facing in the Oracle OBIEE 12C versions, in the Oracle Analytical Server Center or Analytical Cloud versions, Oracle has managed to overcome the challenges."
"The graphical capabilities could be better. They are also cumbersome, and they are limited compared to Tableau, Power BI, or even Business Objects to a certain extent and Cognos. The error logging isn't great either. The errors that come out when you schedule aren't easy to understand. I find how they filter within a query quite cumbersome and difficult to debug if somebody else has done it. You can see as you build, and I think that's where the problem is. It doesn't lend itself to debug something. For example, if you create a formula that's quite complicated, it's not easy to understand what goes with what. It becomes spaghetti, and it's very difficult to unpick. That's really my gripe about it, and in some ways, it's too flexible. It tries to be a Jack of all trades when it's not. I think a lot of these products, if they concentrate on trying to produce your reports, then that's fine. But when they're trying to do all sorts of other things as well, then it isn't very easy. We get lots of support from Oracle, but I think the problem is that we get many invalid file operations. Nobody understands why. It can be a multitude of reasons, but no one reason could cause it. That's just one of the issues we've had in the last year. But the scope of reporting has gone through the roof over the previous 12 to 18 months. We want an end-of-life OBIEE in our environment because some of the infrastructure runs unclustered. We weren't allowed to go clustered for some reason, and we never knew why. Unfortunately, going down that route means that the platform we run it on, WebLogic, has now become non-standard within our organization. Everything's been moved off it and onto other platforms. Unfortunately, our OBIEE runs on that platform, and we're being pushed down different routes, and we don't know where we're going at the moment. Within the next two years, I don't think we'll have OBIEE in our part of the business. In the next release, I think having the capability of being able to develop and then promote to a production environment rather than having to have separate environments will help. I know that Tableau and Power BI can be created on a desktop application, and then when it's ready to go live, you can promote it."
"It was a little bit tedious to install a new release."
"The pricing of the solution should be bettered."
"From the point of view of strategic management, I would like to have a feature, perhaps a form after we get to the KPI dashboard, to be used to note if something unusual happens in the operations. That way we could record extreme KPI situations, and track why a number is very low or too high."
"I would like to see Machine Learning included in this solution."
"Oracle OBIEE can improve the ease of use. It is a lot to learn and it could be made easier."
"An area for improvement is that Oracle pushes more users to Oracle BI Publisher rather than emphasizing Oracle OBIEE for reporting. The pricing for Oracle OBIEE could be improved."
"The integration could be improved. The SAP suite has some integration problems and it has some huge development needs. For example, when you use Power BI, if you publish a dataset to the web, there is no issue in seeing the data with the report. The data and report are integrated automatically. Or when you use QlikView, when you publish the QVD file, the report is integrated with QVD. Also, with Tableau, when you publish the data, it's in the hyper database, in the memory, and the dashboard with data is integrated seamlessly. In the SAP side, it's not easy. There are lots of business layers. There are also some performance issues in the SAP BusinessObjects suite. They should focus on the technologies. We are partners and every step of the way, SAP asks us for money. If you want to see the products, the PDFs, if you want to learn the product, online training, etc., everything has a cost on the SAP site. Because of this, partners try to get to know the products on their own. SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality. In that way, the operation is not easy on the SAP side. As a suggestion, they should focus on customers first instead of money."
"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"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."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."
"The dashboard tool is called Lumira and it is very uncomfortable for developers to use. They should improve this in the future."
"The user interface should be easier to use and navigate."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Cons →
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
