Hello All,
Firstly apologies if there was a similar thread elsewhere, but I couldnt find it from the search box, hence this thread.
This post is just to understand the current job market and career path on BO going forward.
You must have noticed that slowly most of the companies are moving out of Business Objects to other BI tools (Qlik, Tableau, MSBI and OBIEE…etc) due to various reasons (I can clearly see that in the UK market).so not may jobs are available in UK on BO any more.
So whats next for BO developers? I am quiet puzzled actually!!
And what other tools are better to dive in to career proof for the next 5 to 10 years?
Also I am thinking of moving in to Big Data? What you guys think of the career prospects on Big Data?
But i have a network of BO friends and colleagues and majority of them are of the same impression as i am and few of them have already shifted to Qlik and other open source Big Data tools.
Tableau and Qlik can never replace BO - they are simply flavour of the month visualisation/dashboarding tools that seem cheaper than BO but obviously have limited capabilities.
The biggest (legitimate) drift that I have seen away from BO is towards MSBI. It’s not a like for like, with SSRS more like Crystal than Webi but they obviously like the idea of throwing lots of cheap offshore resource at problems.
I can’t believe that you haven’t noticed the downturn in BO job opportunities. Maybe with your skill set you don’t have to look
I’m pretty much retired now, but would still be interested in short-term or part-time work, so keep my eyes open. You only have to look at the likes of JobServe to see how the number of roles out there has drastically reduced, due to clients migrating to other software - my previous client (Vodafone) is just one of them (moving to Microstrategy).
Just on the same note…
Few major banks have moved from BO to OBIEE
Few councils have moved to Qlik
My current client (Retail sector) and my colleagues few previous client are drifting out of BO just because they have licencing issues with SAP and they have to pay a hefty lot and on the other hand there are many tools out there in the market at a very cheaper price (it is debatable though…you only get monkeys for peanuts, but organisations are only looking at reducing their cost and just serve the purpose)
When you say a few major banks, do you have exact numbers? I know of at least one major bank consolidating their BO platform and another getting it working harder for them.
The tools at a much cheaper price are often not comparable in terms of functionality or the overall TCO is incorrectly shown (think of Dell PCs and what the ticket price is versus what you end up paying).
The problem is that SAP themselves are not interested in SMEs any more - unless people know that you need to go to the resellers like Acuma for a decent deal for small businesses, then they’ll end up getting a less than adequate offering instead.
Huh, not sure about councils not moving away from BO - I’m probably about to be made redundant from my job in the public sector. Mind you, I think it’s a cost-cutting exercise - the work is still there, but our jobs have been re-graded and I refuse to take a pay cut because I know I will end up doing the same job as I am now (statutory reporting).
I expect I will end up contracting until I finally retire.
I think its more a case of BO having weak dash boarding products and these being expensive so a lot of places now have a combo of tools like BO and Tableau etc, with BO being used for large volume enterprise reporting and Tableau more for dash boarding / smaller user base.
Tableau has got itself a strong foot hold in the finance sector and a lot of front office functions trading desks, quants etc like it so I would recommend learning Tableau if finance is your area, it may not be the best product but business like it and they pay the bills so it an easy skill to sell, plus there free online training is good.
I know of a few big SAP BO users who wanted to ditch it and only reason they didn’t was there deployments were so big they couldn’t. I don’t know whats going on with SAP but they seemed to have p*ssed off a lot of large clients in the last few years and they are voting with there feet.
It has been one of the worst years for contract work in general, not just Business Objects.
As such, most roles do not appear on the job boards as they are word of mouth, or offered up to agents “pet” contractors.
As far as Tableau or Qlikview, as discussed, different beasts, right tools for the right jobs etc.
A friend who has just started with BO Design Studio says its very powerful and he is impressed with it
(BOB member since 2008-05-20)
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
(BOB member since 2003-05-26)
