I looked at two older SAP Community questions comparing B.O. to Tableau (here and here), but I’d like a fresh (quick) comparison.
I’ve used Business Objects for 7 years and really like it. It’s a workhorse, and I’m sure if my Dept got some motivation we could do snazzy-enough Dashboards (good enough for government work).
Business Objects for us is great, we just connect to the Oracle transaction system and it’s good to go. We don’t have big data so it’s fine, our work is mostly for operational reporting. We also have a Data Warehouse but it’s essentially a transactional d.b., not really a true data warehouse (summarized etc.).
Previously I considered Tableau and Business Objects similar tools, but the two older questions above beg to differ, as Tableau has always been the ‘data visualization’ tool.
Then I come to find out that there is such a thing as “[Tableau Prep]” which looks like an ETL tool … This would not work for us because the ETL component is a ton of overhead, which we don’t have at all in our Oracle environment - we just connect Business Objects to Oracle and start building Universes and such.
So I’m trying to avoid a big “uh-oh - we got a lotta work to do” if we jump into Tableau.
*Tableau has come into the mix as we have a license to it via Salesforce, but we’ve also implemented Google Big Query and so that is going to be our database to pull from.
**I would prefer we just use Business Objects, but it’s on the way out along with Oracle (in 5-6 years)
Tableau Prep strikes me as a similar tool to Alteryx - it can do some ETL and data amalgamation in readiness for you loading into a Tableau dashboard. It’s visually pretty, does transform on the fly with some sample data, etc.
I’d suggest that there’s no need to worry just yet - BO and Tableau have sat side-by-side in a fair few companies; BO’s reporting tool has been a go-to enterprise reporting tool for 25 years; unfortunately its dashboarding tools (Polestar, Xcelsius, Lumira…) have let it down, which is where Tableau and Power BI have gained foothold.
There’s no reason you couldn’t simply sit the two side by side yourself with Oracle replaced by Google (and continuing to report over Oracle until it’s completely gone). A big bang move will leave you, potentially, with not knowing which part of the reporting pipeline has failed.
What is replacing Business Objects for your enterprise reporting?
For the Enterprise Development system, Salesforce replaces Oracle home grown system and Business Objects. (I’m not a big fan of Salesforce, especially for Reporting)
For me on the Data Warehouse team, the replacement to Business Objects is Google Big Query, which comes with Data Studio (which looks ok)
It’s always funny seeing people react to that statement in the management team after they’ve just been sold a Ferrari to tow a caravan