Overview
What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence?
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform provides users with ad hoc queries, reporting, data visualizations, and analysis tools. Its integrated, unified infrastructure aims to offer scalability from one-to-many tools and interfaces on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.
Happy User
SAP BO - Great for Operational Reporting
SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
SAP BusinesssObjects Business Intelligence Review by Saurabh Raheja
SAP Business Objects is a must have for your organisations Reporting and Analysis needs
Business Insights at Your Fingertips
Good choice for providing business reports from a variety of data sources
SAP BO and I: A love story
SAP Business Objects: Review by a Grumpy Old Customer
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Review
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) overall satisfaction
SAP BI Review
A good tool for a business analyst
SAP offers a sufficient tool with their BI Platform
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Multi-User Support (named login) (46)9.090%
- Drill-down analysis (45)9.090%
- Customizable dashboards (45)8.181%
- Report Formatting Templates (45)7.676%
Pricing
What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence?
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform provides users with ad hoc queries, reporting, data visualizations, and analysis tools. Its integrated, unified infrastructure aims to offer scalability from one-to-many tools and interfaces on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.
What is SAP Analytics Cloud?
The SAP Analytics Cloud solution brings together analytics and planning with integration to SAP applications and access to heterogenous data sources. As the analytics and planning solution within SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud supports trusted insights and integrated planning…
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 7.4Pixel Perfect reports(44) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 8.1Customizable dashboards(45) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 7.6Report Formatting Templates(45) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 9Drill-down analysis(45) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 8.3Formatting capabilities(45) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 7.5Integration with R or other statistical packages(31) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 8.2Report sharing and collaboration(45) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 8.3Publish to Web(38) Ratings
- 7.8Publish to PDF(44) Ratings
- 9.1Report Versioning(40) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 9.1Report Delivery Scheduling(45) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
- 9.2Delivery to Remote Servers(24) Ratings
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
Data Discovery and Visualization
Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.
- 8.3Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(39) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 7.6Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(37) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 8.9Predictive Analytics(36) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
Access Control and Security
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- 9Multi-User Support (named login)(46) Ratings
Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.
- 9.1Role-Based Security Model(44) Ratings
Role-based access means that access to data is determined by job or position in the corporation.
- 9.9Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)(43) Ratings
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
- 9.9Single Sign-On (SSO)(27) Ratings
Allows users to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications
Mobile Capabilities
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- 8.3Responsive Design for Web Access(31) Ratings
Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.
- 9Mobile Application(26) Ratings
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
- 9.1Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile(28) Ratings
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another
- 7.3REST API(19) Ratings
REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications
- 7.2Javascript API(17) Ratings
A Javascript API is a type of API
- 8.1iFrames(16) Ratings
An iFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website
- 7.4Java API(20) Ratings
A Java application programming interface (API) is a list of all classes that are part of the Java development kit (JDK)
- 7.3Themeable User Interface (UI)(19) Ratings
A themeable user interface means that a specific visual them can be applied to it
- 7.3Customizable Platform (Open Source)(18) Ratings
A customizable, open source API Gateway is a fast and scalable type of API
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence?
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Features
- Supported: Reporting and analysis
- Supported: Data visualization and analytics applications
- Supported: Office integration
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Competitors
- Microsoft BI (MSBI)
- Tableau Desktop
- MicroStrategy
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Apple Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Windows: Server 2008 and 2012; Suse SLES 11 x86_64; Red Hat EL 5 and 6 x86_64; AIX 6.1 and 7.1 Power; Solaris 10 and 11 SPARC |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(839)Attribute Ratings
- 8.3Likelihood to Renew24 ratings
- 10Availability5 ratings
- 9Performance10 ratings
- 9Usability14 ratings
- 8.6Support Rating16 ratings
- 9Online Training2 ratings
- 10In-Person Training4 ratings
- 9Implementation Rating8 ratings
- 9Configurability2 ratings
- 9Product Scalability2 ratings
- 9Ease of integration1 rating
- 9Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 9Vendor post-sale1 rating
- 8.1Data Visualization9 ratings
- 8.3Data Sources45 ratings
- 8.2Data Sharing and Collaboration45 ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 71)Great SAP data analytics product
- Analytics
- Continuous refresh of reports
- Easy customizations using ABAP
- Memory requirements
- Hardware requirements
- Continuous operational support
Happy User
- Broadcasting reports on schedule
- Showing data analytics that have drill down capabilities
- Monitoring and managing custom report by user
- Ease of use
- Reports building can be a challenge unless your an excel wiz
- Easier use of adding in other data sources
SAP BO - Great for Operational Reporting
- Scheduling of Reports
- Formatting the report as per business requirements
- Good user interface for users and developers
- Not able to paste multiple values without semi-colon while filtering the data. Adding semi-colon makes the functionality difficult to use.
- User interface can be improved
- It is costly
- The performance of the report decreases if complex logic/functions are added
SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
- visualize data
- enable interactions
- real-time connectivity
- browser crashes sometimes
SAP BusinesssObjects Business Intelligence Review by Saurabh Raheja
- Maintaining users and user groups in CMC.
- Scheduling Web Reports through CMC to get reports delivered to emails at any given frequency.
- Maintaining roles and securities for different users, users group and BO servers
- Regarding improvement, there is very little scope now as it has already grown up so well from BO BI 3.1 to BO BI 4.0, then BO BI 4.1, then BO BI 4.2 and now the latest is BO BI 4.3
- One improvement I can think of is that it can go on the cloud. For example, a physical box may not be required for the installation of SAP BI BO.
SAP Business Objects is a must have for your organisations Reporting and Analysis needs
- Connects to various data sources
- Excellent for building adhoc reports and doing analysis on the fly
- The scheduling and publication functions are great time savers and allow us to manage many regular and recurring reports.
- At the moment we are experiencing some performance issues, but this may be down to our own companies network/infrastructure and not the BI tool
- The older Client version I thought was more stable than the 4.2 web-based version. But this again could be down to the companies network/infrastructure
Business Insights at Your Fingertips
- Deep insights on performance.
- Ease of use for inexperienced users.
- It has a good capability of combining a variety of different data sources like ODBC, Excel, SQL Server, text, etc.
- Design is relatively straightforward and is flexible enough to let different functions be used in different scopes (whole report, section of a report, etc) to create parts, combining data from different sources.
- There are different design interfaces like HTML, applet and rich client which may be handy in different circumstances.
- Scheduling of the report updates help you organize timing of your report activities.
- Although limited, comparison of the updated report with its previous data is a good feature.
- Adding complex functions and calculations may significantly slow down the reports.
- Comparison of the report data histories could be extended. Currently you can only compare your report with only previous run but not with any older versions.
- Web, applet and rich clients UI's do not always have the same design functions available, for example.
- You may find yourself unable to export multiple reports at the same time in web interface where you can do it in the rich client interface.
- More flexibility in report design could be helpful such as copying report sections between different reports, multi select and modifications of sub reports, etc.
- Drilldown could be improved . For example, a feature to export drilldown structure to Excel or faster drilldown would help a lot.
SAP BO and I: A love story
- Ingest data from multiple areas of the business and use them to generate easy to understand reports.
- Report scheduling is simple and efficient allowing the team to run reports at a variety of different times to suit the stakeholder's needs.
- The metalayer takes away some of the complexities of other programs, allowing the end user to interact with the program in a clean and efficient way.
- We have had some difficulty linking up with data in some of our web portals. This has caused a large amount of development time, and support has been less than its usual helpful self in this regard.
- Older versions had functions which have now been removed, or replaced with less effecient functions. For example the HTML output option.
- Some configuration issues have arisen when we have attempted to configure API'S. Some require a JDBC connection, which was slightly more difficult than expected.
SAP Business Objects: Review by a Grumpy Old Customer
- Simplicity. It is very easy for a non technical user to create and format a report in Web Intelligence. This is especially true with the new 4.1 release.
- Report distribution. Several options available, such as FTP, File Location, BO Inbox and Email. Each is very intuitive and simple to use without any confusing, very technical options (ex. Oracle's OBIEE).
- Scheduling. This is a very important feature that is being used a lot here at the city (over 700 scheduled reports run every night). Very robust scheduling engine that can be easily configured and adjusted by the administrator if needed.
- Service Pack/Fix Pack reliability. Each SP/FP fixes certain bugs, but unfortunately sometimes messes up other features (problematic upgrade from TOMCAT 5 to 7) which can be very frustrating. That is why we carefully test every one of them in our DEV environment before promoting it to Production/
- JAVA vulnerability. It appears SAP is slow with latest JAVA client (needed for Web Intelligence report creation/edit) support. This creates issues when users update their JAVA release to the latest version, which is not yet supported by SAP resulting in error messages.
- Internal reporting on Business Objects environment. You can report against user activity (from the audit tables), but there is no build in tool/capability to report on BO content, users, security environment which is very helpful for the administrators. Third party expensive tools are needed (APOS).
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Review
- SOA Service Oriented architecture
- Architecture scaling and deployment can be managed easily, clustering nodes and servers to give scalability
- User friendly administration modules
- User friendly reporting modules like Web Intelligence, SAP Lumira, SAC
- Strong semantic layer supporting multi-source database
- Waterfall model design is used
- Need to compete with Agile architecture and design
- Quick turn time like Modern BI agile tools
- Nice visualization.
- Nice reporting.
- Integrated system.
- Required java.
- Based on Adobe.
- Stability.
SAP BI Review
- It is easy to use and is easily understandable.
- Lots of built-in functionality which makes things easier for developers.
- Paid tool.
- Connectivity should be better with the latest data sources.
A good tool for a business analyst
- Nice, interactive visualizations.
- Suitable for ad-hoc analysis.
- Costly.
- Limited tools.
SAP offers a sufficient tool with their BI Platform
- Data extraction.
- Connection to the SAP universe via a good front-end.
- Should be cheaper.
- It is not easy to learn.
- Easily adaptable for any level of user's technical ability to use reporting tools.
- Ad-hoc reporting capabilities.
- Impact analysis (data lineage) features are not available in the tool.
- Administrators cannot perform bulk activities.
Coming to ease of creating visualization dashboards, it is bit challenging to use Dashboard tools of BO compared to other tools in the market like Tableau.
Possibly the best reporting tool you can have.
- Crystal Reports allows you to get any report and in the layout you prefer.
- Customisation to any area and to get any report you want.
- Once learned, it's really easy to use and understand the logic.
- Some more training time is needed to understand, but it's worth the time investment.
Get over the set-up hump and you are in the clear!
- Real-time business intelligence.
- Data consumption is super simple.
- Integrations with Microsoft office.
- The price is high.
- Initial implementation could be easier.
- Customer support wasn't what we expected and could use some work.
BI Platform Review
- Easy access to fully developed reports
- Ability to schedule report output to different destination types.
- Platform administration.
- Stability. Servers go down, memory leaks.
- Support is better than five years ago, but still doesn't measure up.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform - The corporate on-premise solution from SAP
- Operational reporting through the SAP Web Intelligence tool
- Pixel-perfect reporting through SAP Crystal Reports
- Visualizations with SAP Lumira
- Avoid the need to use Java in certain functionalities.
- Avoid reliance on Adobe Flash on certain features.
- Improvement in the need for adaptations for mobile devices.
On-Demand Reporting Made Easy
- Fast, on demand reporting.
- Rapid development of new business analysis.
- It is low maintenance once configured and deployed to production.
- Report scheduling and distribution.
- Quicker methods to bulk load reports into the reporting pool.
Why SAP? Why?
- It has a great way of displaying information.
- It's affordable.
- It can scale well provided you have good support.
- The interface looks like it's something out of 1999.
- Customer support is horrible and honestly it's a lottery any time you call.
- The system crashes constantly.
SAP BO - Top rated BI system in a multinational organization
- This software is easy to initially learn, and very powerful in producing reusable reports.
- It is much faster than my company's internal manual queries. The ability to build off of a saved query and share queries to other users is a great positive.
- My favorite part is that you can run queries in the background and it does not interfere with your current work or slow your computer down.
- There is a learning curve to understand how to use the queries/objects and decide which data to pull, so there is training required.
- Some of the "result objects" also do not pull data but that is likely due to our internal data, not Business objects itself.
- The tool's license are expensive but you get what you pay for. SAP's business tool licenses in general have never been cheap but that ensures you get proper product support whenever needed.
SAP Business Objects is a complex but valuable tool.
- It is a very flexible platform with many different add-ons that provide lots of different functionality.
- If configured and installed correctly it can be a very robust and dependable platform for the business.
- It has the ability to handle almost all types of data sources you can throw at it.
- The installation can be very complex and time-consuming, it requires a lot of planning and foresight as to what role the software will play in the organization.
- The software has a relatively large learning curve that takes dedicated users months to get comfortable with, the UI is a bit intimidating for new users.
- SAP could organize their help better, it can be difficult to find dependable solutions to issues via their website and support channels.
- Allows significant customization and filtering of the data when creating reports.
- Is an easy, relatively user-friendly way of accessing the data.
- No SQL or other programming languages needed for queries.
- The interface is old and unintuitive. The tooltips are helpful but for someone new to it there is little help in where to begin and what to do
- This may be our systems but it is slow when querying our data.
- For some reason when exporting the data, if I choose reports it never exports ALL the data so I am not sure what function that option is supposed to provide.