Jaspersoft vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

TIBCO Jaspersoft is well suited for users who are not too technical. These users are able to easily drag and drop domain fields from their database to create friendly table reports. Users can easily add filters to their reports which allows for reusability. On the other hand, if a user is looking to add information that has many-to-many relationships, duplicates will appear. Having duplicates in an ad-hoc view and not being able to easily remove them is a big issue for many of our clients.

Incentivized

The proper management of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards requires an expert on the team to manage and build reports. If an organization does not have the proper expertise on board to build and deploy reports it will fail. Data analytics, dropping into excel, and broadcasting of information are major bonuses for the use of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.

• Jaspersoft has an excellent self-service module that allows ad hoc report creation and can be easily worked by non-technical users as well.
• Using this tool, it doesn't matter if you are viewing the report on a desktop screen or smaller mobile screens, the experience is seamless.

Incentivized

• This software is easy to initially learn, and very powerful in producing reusable reports.
• It is much faster than my company's internal manual queries. The ability to build off of a saved query and share queries to other users is a great positive.
• My favorite part is that you can run queries in the background and it does not interfere with your current work or slow your computer down.

Incentivized

• The UI on the report designer, Jaspersoft Studio, looks a little outdated. I think that Studio as a whole could use a facelift. Additionally, Jaspersoft Studio tends to slow down over time, requiring a restart of the program.
• There is a bit of a learning curve with all of the intricacies of Jaspersoft Studio, it's kind of overwhelming when trying to learn it from nothing.
• One functionality that seems to be missing, that would help our use-case, would be the ability to parameterize a JSON URL as a data source. For example, if there was a call to a set of JSON data, it has to be a static URL. But in many cases, APIs that return JSON take parameters via the URL. Jaspersoft does not support that.

Incentivized

• The installation can be very complex and time-consuming, it requires a lot of planning and foresight as to what role the software will play in the organization.
• The software has a relatively large learning curve that takes dedicated users months to get comfortable with, the UI is a bit intimidating for new users.
• SAP could organize their help better, it can be difficult to find dependable solutions to issues via their website and support channels.

Incentivized

We've converted our library of reports to use Jaspersoft. Our clients have had a taste of Jaspersoft and we've had very positive feedback from those interactions. Our internal employees have had great success using iReports and JasperStudio to create very robust reports that better show the data our clients expect to see. Overall, our experiences with Jaspersoft have been great and it's proven to be a very good decision for the direction of our business.

The institution has decided to move in a different direction, and will be using MSBI for reporting. I have been very happy with the Business Objects suite of tools, and will continue to use them heavily until we make the transition.

Incentivized

I think it's a tool well suited for a software developer. Others with less coding skills could struggle somewhat with the tool. I find java a little unforgiving as a language for expressions and not very user friendly for the technically dis-inclined. Sometimes the numeric conversions cause issues (who knew that 0 and 0.0 would cause different things to happen). Previous experience with a reporting tool that used visual basic for its' expressions that I found much simpler to use. On the other hand, java is so widespread, you can easily google the syntax to accomplish what you need to do.

Incentivized

SAP Business Objects is a great tool for operational reporting. It provides a lot of capabilities for scheduling the reports for end users as well as for Adhoc data analysis by business users. One can easily format a report in SAP BO. The tool is not very difficult to learn for both End users and Developers.

Incentivized

There have been a few instances where Tomcat has consumed 100% CPU, which requires a restart to resolve, but other than that reliability has been excellent.

Incentivized

When we implemented 3.1, we had a tough time managing the system: It took almost a year to stabilize.

With 4.0, we want to roll out to more users, and are holding back because of fears about the performance issue

Complex reports on heavy data load may take considerable amount of time. We have experinced some latencies/misfires regarding to this.

Incentivized

Overall, the tool (Web Intelligence 4.2) is fast and solid. One issue is a dependability on JAVA for a full feature report creation/edit capabilities (as opposed to limited HTML option). Second, planned end of JAVA support by major browsers (Chrome is already not supporting JAVA applet).

They have a great customer support ticketing system in which they always respond same-day. They offer conference calls with srcreensharing as well in order to better understand your issues.

I wish that the lower level support access came with more than just 12 cases per year though as this makes us less likely to reach out for questions on things that we then instead try to solve ourselves which results in loss of time in trying to acquire new features and or solve a problem.

Incentivized

We are getting the BI support from our SAP support company. Although they are good at some basic staff, they are unable to answer our questions for some complex structures. Sometimes we got the feedback that our request was not possible to implement, however later we found there were some methods available.

Incentivized

It did the job of getting us to our deadline we set for ourselves for initial launch. The customer we launched the product for was also there to learn about it at the same in order to better understand the capabilities. This helped greatly so that the customer was on the same page on what was possible when using jaspersoft. I think most people would not want their customers aware the product they are using is third-party but in this case it was a new experience for us both and so as we learned more about jaspersoft, we both had better communication on what the future road map was for their business needs in BI.

Incentivized

This is more a function of the training I received from the systems experts in my organization, not training from Business Objects/SAP. The training was rushed, without an agenda, and didn’t meet my needs as a user.

Resources available in the TIBCO Knowledge Base are covering almost everything. They are well organized, and covering almost every possibility. There is always the change to get back to the TIBCO support or to the dedicated Customer Success Manager whenever something very specific or bound to a customization is not covered.

Incentivized

I haven't used it or got feedback from the end user.

Content looks to be pretty detailed. Focused on SQL but not BW.

Super easy to install and/or upgrade! For all the big name software out there that does some business critical things, Jasper is a pleasure to install and/or upgrade. The bundled installer is all ONE install (one shell script execution at least) that sets up everything. Vastly superior to most other software of this caliber.

Incentivized

Hire specialists and experienced staff. Mix some beginners so that everyone is not a leader but a learner too. Plan well; architect well; break down implementation in small steps and move towards larger steps. Create a centralized and authorized SAP Business Objects implementation team.

Incentivized

TIBCO does a better job in providing seamless data mapping and migration from one legacy system to other without any loss of traffic or compromising the security of the data. Whereas with another tool sometimes because of the integral framework there may be some questions as to why the data packets were lost during mapping and migration.

Incentivized

This has the biggest drawback of handling the large data volume which I feel is needed as this is time-consuming and making decisions at the right time is getting harder and we have decided to move to this platform considering the time taken to process the data.

Incentivized

We haven't really started to explore the scalability of the product as yet, but in terms of existing deployments it has done what we need it to do.

Incentivized

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform supports SOA Service Oriented Architecture. You can start/restart/enable/disable all the servers. You can seamless do load balancing and clustering. It supports all leading application and web server. Supports LDAP SSO integration. People who can work on excel with training they can work on SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence, dashboard, Lumira, Information design tool product suite. Tool is very user friendly and easy to learn and implement

Incentivized

• I used the free version, so obviously the positive side is we did not have to pay
• Next advantage is you can pick it up relatively fast, even though I think the UI can be much improved. Otherwise creating PDF reports by programming is quite a complicate task, to me anyway

• SAP BO BI Platform has a good positive impact on the overall business of any organization. It helps in important decision making, planning, and analyzing the growth of the particular organization
• Another positive impact is that users get hold of data very easily and in a user-friendly manner. users can even interact with reports to get the meaningful data filtered out of that.
• The negative impact can be on licensing costs and buying this software box. This in turn will add to the cost of expenses of a particular organization

Incentivized