Has anyone moved to their SAP BI implementation to the Private Cloud Edition? If so, can you share your experience and how this works exactly with 4.2 (or 4.3 if that the version you are on)? Can you still customize the BO servers via the CMC as well as the images? I imagine you cannot change the tomcat (or webapp) settings as all of it is hosted with SAP.
Also, is this free to do for a period of time as a result of leveraging your current SAP BI license? It appears as if they will be integrating this with SAP Analytics, any idea how this comes into play if at all?
Hi,
we had an experience last year. It’s been a bit of a blood bath, but fortunately we had a lot of experience in BO upgrading and migration.
The main issue for me is the SAP approach to it: it’s all managed to SAP, but not really. You need to open Service Request knowing clearly what you need to do, and the support is very lacking.
For example, SAP PCE is a Linux environment: we had to understand how to migrate from a Windows AD Authentication and how to manage the exports of the reports to move from cloud to on-premise netwokr (we had a requirement for it). Fortunately there was a a team (SAP dCEM) which helped us, but it required A LOT of interactions (I was hoping for some guidelines, but for SAP it was to be handled by customer/partner…which is bs).
The Service Requests require a LOT of time, especially if you use the generic assisted (if you can’t find the specific one). There is no online Expert Chat interaction (which I love), you answer and you can’t do anything else. Sometimes I had to upload text files to be sure they read me.
You don’t get a client machine for your clients → it’s up to you. We were lucky that the client had implemented other things on SAP PCE so the network was correctly managed.
Unfortunately, we had some issues; some we might had been thinking before, but still the lack of support and approach from SAP was evident. The first was the timezone: even if we’re in the same of Frankfurt, all the SAP PCE server are in UTCs → all the schedules were wrong on go-live! We had to set them one by one. The other thing was the language, and SAP made some errors to install additional language (we couldn’t login).
And now we had the issue with SSL: we asked to update to SP4 latest patch, but SAP added a new requirement on SSL which is “better” to have signed from a public CA…otherwise you can’t login. We had SSL off-loading with internal CA which was working perfectly, and we went crazy in the test environment with this requirement.
Really, it’s like cloud-but-not-so-cloud, and with a very rigid support. I would not support it.
Another possibility for organizations that want to outsource the support of BusinessObjects would be to let Protiviti maintain it in AWS on their behalf as a managed service.
