Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued) vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

If you want to create a visual dashboard or report that utilises various data sources then PowerBI can do this. It is great in that it takes your on-premises data and stores it on Microsoft servers where it can interact with it faster, reducing load on your own servers, while being efficient in what it transfers out. We have found it not well suited if you wanted to publish a simple report to many staff as they may all need a Pro license which can get expensive. Even if embedding the report onto a shared platform like SharePoint, it will not display if the users doesn't have a PowerBI Pro license.

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.

• Ease of use. Most people have experience working with Excel. If you know how to create pivots, you can use Power BI.
• Data extraction and transformation (ETL). ETL is a joy with Power Query. It is intuitive, simple and a magical experience to transform poor data into something useful.
• Visuals. Power BI is beautiful to behold, especially Power View.
• Maps. The interactive maps are great built-in tools.
• Cost You cannot find anything cheaper than Power BI, unless you want to give it to every user in your company.

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

• Like many Microsoft products, you can get by with a small understanding of the product, but to truly realize the entire potential does take a while to learn.
• Hooking up SQL databases to the cloud version is a more complex than just querying right into the database from the desktop version.

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

If I were a small business owner, I would likely use Power BI for Office 365 for the sheer fact that I would get the Office licensing I need, along with powerful capabilities. As a Microsoft Partner, we continue to see Microsoft invest heavily in the Power BI capabilities, and will continue to implement and support BI solutions around this product, as we believe this is in the best interest of our clients.

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

We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.

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

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

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).

as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.

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

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.

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

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

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

One main competitor of Power BI is Tableau. Tableau has been around longer than Power BI so it can feel a little more refined in areas, however Power BI is catching up quickly. Tableau can be more expensive than Power BI. If you want more features and more refinement, and don't mind extra cost, then Tableau may be a better choice. But if you want something that's integrated with many things in O365, and are satisfied with fewer bells and whistles, Power BI may be the better option.

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

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

• As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
• One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.

• 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