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."The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"We use it to identify critical KPIs to senior management."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
"It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly-complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."
"Reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst."
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"The product is stable, reliable, and scalable."
"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."
"I believe that the possibilities for exploring data and formulating visual results are quite good because it allows the business analyst to have different perspectives on the data."
"Simplifies report designs and quickly displays tables and graphs."
"It integrates well with SAS, making it simple and quick for developers."
"The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed."
"It's relatively simple to create basic dashboards and reports."
"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."
"I really want SAP to focus on the dashboarding side. Based on what I have seen in the past 10 years, dashboarding has captured a lot of markets. Executives at the top-level want data that is summarized, looks good, and tells you a story. That's where Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI have an upper edge. It doesn't mean SAP doesn't give you dashboarding. They do have a dashboarding solution, but Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are more intuitive and more attractive. I would like SAP to capture the dashboarding market as well, wherein they give at least some competition to other competitors. Presently, Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are leading the market."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to be improved performance-wise. The look and feel of this application, its scalability, setup, and technical support also need improvement."
"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau. Currently, for data visualization, you need to spend more money to buy another solution such as Power BI or Tableau. It is also very hard to integrate it with other third-party solutions. Its integration with other solutions should be improved."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
"Factoring in total implementation and maintenance costs, SAP BusinessObjects is too expensive. If you deal with a huge amount of data, you can go with BusinessObjects. However, if you are a medium-sized company with a modest amount of data, you can opt for another solution."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"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."
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"The charts and tables could use better sorting, primarily using other variables than the ones on the figure. If they could implement views like in the older version (previous to Viya), it would be very nice."
"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."
"A bit more flexibility in the temperatization will be helpful."
"It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView."
"SAS Visual Analytics could be more user-friendly."
"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 product is expensive and needs the integration of more languages."
"I haven't come across any missing features."
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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 102 reviews while SAS Visual Analytics is ranked 7th 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 AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3), whereas SAS Visual Analytics is most compared with Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Databricks, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and IBM Watson 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