Does anyone have any information on BO vs Brio?
Any literature and or personal experience with the tools would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
A few points to start with:
Brio is easier to use than BO. BO is more flexible. That comes with complexity.
Brio requires browser plugin, BO does not. Because of this, web-based BO reporting are not as powerful as the full-client version.
BO requires more up-front work in setting up universe, therefore there are more administration work for BO. If you have more than one person creating reports, universe ensures data/reporting consistency across different reports.
Brio downloads data to your PC - client based processing; BO uses server-based processing. If you do not design your warehouse correctly, Brio can end up downloading too many rows that may crash users’ PC.
It all depends on your requirements…
Lionel
— Brian bwalh@COREINTEGRATION.COM wrote:
Does anyone have any information on BO vs Brio?
Any literature and or personal experience with the tools would be
appreciated.
Thanks!
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)
Brian,
The biggest difference is cost…Brio is way cheaper, at least it used to be, and I imagine it still is.
BO will allow you to do more complex things than Brio. The creation of complex and compound measures significantly differentiate MicroStrategy/BO from the Brio end of the market. (Brio may have put compound measures into a recent version as they were aware this was a ‘shortfall’.)
What I have found is that companies that are relatively new into Dwing and who do not plan to have or know they need very complex calculations will go for the Brio price point (not just brio but also Cognos, more on that later) because they cannot see the justification of the extra dollars for BO/MicroStrategy. However, large companies that know they have large user bases and complex requirements will plug for the extra dollars. I had one client with 1,700 users of Microstrategy who swore by it and considered Brio too simplistic for his needs.
I had one customer who was looking at 1000 users who made the comment ‘What I want is the Microstrategy functionality at a Brio price point.’ For the 1000 users the Brio price point was 1/3 of Microstrategy when Brio fell out of consideration.
Funnily enough, that particular customer finished up buying 1000 seats of BO. I heard the final BO price was around 2.5 times the Brio price. I don’t know the final MSTR price offered. (These were very special prices given the company buying them was likely to buy a lot more than just the initial 1000 seats.) The guys from MSTR and BO fought it out for a long time before BO came out on top. I was told by the person who led the evaluation that it was close but the ‘sexy BO web interface’ looked better than MSTR and BO gathered more votes on the front end usability than MSTR from the users.
Brio does push data down to your PC in both the web and client versions. I believe this is exactly like BO in the client version. Brio does allow you to generate reports on the web server and distribute those reports. The data for those reports is distributed with the report. It is compressed into what is called a ‘quick cube’. The trick is to develop the report such that the quickcube is not too large. This is generally easy as the quick cube is only required to contain what is presented and the data you want to be able to ‘drill anywhere’ on within the report. If you want to drill further than the data in the quick cube you have to go back to the server…as per normal.
Brio does have a repository function that allows multiple developers to be developing reports off one data model and it does have a mechanism to propagate data model changes to all reports that are in the repository. If you just have a report out on your desktop that the Brio repository does not know about it does not get the update. With BO it works a little differently in that you must always build a report off a repository and when that repository is updated you will get the change when you get the new copy of the repository.
The Brio web product does require a plug in…It is the entire Brio product which is why the web version operates exactly like the client version. It is the client version. BO (and everybody else) had to write new code to implement web versions mostly because there was no way the entire product could be loaded as a plug in. This led to web versions coming out that had significantly lower functionality than the client version, though most have caught up to be 90%+ of the client version.
The other product that has made a big improvement for web reporting is Cognos. The new web version is unrecognizable from the previous version which had very serious problems. I have just done a project with a cognos web front end. I was very hesitant. I had a client two years ago who implemented and early version of cognos web…it was not pretty. I saw the new version and I was amazed. The prototypes went together like a dream and it is just going into production in the next few weeks.
So, it depends on your requirements. If you are at the high end of number of users, want complex compound measures, want web delivery with server side processing take a look at BO/MicroStrategy. They are worth the money.
If you do not need these things you should take a look at the lower price point tools to see if they cover everything you need.
If you want a very detailed analysis of current versions and you are prepared to pay for the opinion you might want to engage PwC. I used to work for them and I know they keep up to date on the front end tools and have excellent end user tools comparison spreadsheets.
Hope this helps…(Hope all my comments are accurate still.)
Peter Nolan
Data Warehousing Consultant
Mobile: +353-879 581 732
Fax: +44-870 029 1677
Listserv Archives (BOB member since 2002-06-25)