Hi everyone - after a long time. My association with BusObj ended a few years back with role changes (almost a career track change). Now - after 5-6 years away from any BI activity - I have some key questions for the group:
1- Why do you think SAP BI suite is ranked almost at the bottom of the gartner BI & analytics quadrant?
2- Did Lumira & Design Studio meet your expectations ? It didnt for me when it was in initial year or 2 of development
3- “Web Intelligence & Designer” - Boy I used to love working on those. Are they still getting incremental improvements?
4- The whole “Cloud” thing… Any adopters and any early feedback( Good, Okay, worth it, waste of time and $ )?
I used to be good at tracking every last bit of incremental functionality in SAP BusinessObjects - but now, asking for help to understand what has changed in the last few years. I am just looking for feedback and opinion - and that would be greatly appreciated
1 should point to the success of 2 - or rather lack of it. Don’t forget that the gartner quadrant is all about analytics, not reporting, so it’s Lumira v Power BI v Tableau v Qlik, etc. Power BI and Tableau are the big hitters these days.
3 - still great tools, still new stuff going in. SAP having to play catch up after devoting 10 years to getting BW to work with BO!!
4. Not used it yet, but we’re looking either AWS or Azure for the warehouse as a first step.
I have heard that there are improvements coming for Webi. The big one for me and one project was to be able to write SQL for a report. No need to create a universe for a one off report.
Gartner changed the criteria in the BI quadrant away from enterprise BI and reporting into more pure visualisation. This is why SAP dropped down and Oracle pretty much disappeared (although Oracle have OAI now).
SAP Analytics Cloud is what I would call ‘Ok’. In some respects it easier to use than, say PowerBI, but in other respects it tries to cover too much ground without mastering any of them. Although SAP were first to market with smart insight capability, which PBI has just got and Tableau is releasing soon.
You should consider though that SAC is a true SaaS analytics tool, PowerBI and Tableau are hybrid in as much as to do anything serious you need a client. So effectively SAC`s competition is Looker, SiSense, Birst and ThoughtSpot amongst others.
I have to say that the org I am working for now, won’t move to any Cloud platform with SAP: They also don’t use WEBI, essentially; they are using BOE as the scheduling platform and utilizing Crystal Reports to design all the reports.
With that said; we are on a five year plan to eliminate BOE from our Environment, replacing it with Qlik.
4 - I’ve stood up 4.2 SP6 on AWS Windows and RHEL instances, now SP7 on Windows. My opinion - it’s definitely worth it for the flexibility you gain over on-premise.
Lumira was a waste of time. Too inflexible and very limited. Design Studio not much better IMO.
Now Xcelsius (aka SAP Business Objects Dashboards) was and still is an amazing product. That ability to simply write SQL and use the XML output to drive a visualisation. Simple easy and effective, but sadly limited with its reliance on flash. I still use Xcelsius for some intranet dashboards.
We’re still using webi for reporting but much of the visualisation is now in Power BI. Early PBI was clunky but with monthly upgrades, it’s becoming very powerful and having the ability to directly influence development, is a big plus, too.
I set myself a personal challenge the other day to rebuild some PowerBI things in Webi. Apart from mapping stuff (and the ability to mash data quickly), theres not a lot I can do in PowerBI that I cant do in Webi. People tend to write Webi off as a visualisation tool for some strange reason. In other news I just installed Cognos Analytics 11.1 - man it`s horrible!
(BOB member since 2010-06-23)
(BOB member since 2006-02-08)
(BOB member since 2010-06-23)
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(BOB member since 2006-02-08)