Roambi (discontinued) vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

I would recommend Roambi for its ease-of-use and quick deployment. It is very visually rich and eye-catching, and I believe it is best suited for presenting business & finance dashboard to C-level management and sales representatives in the field. Because it can be accessed on the iPhone or iPad, it is very mobile and the Apple touch interfaces are nearly flawless. If an organization needs to really dig deep into their data, I would look elsewhere, as Roambi has certain limitations.

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.

• Very intuitive user interface that exploits the touch capabilities of tablets and smartphones very well.
• Offline capability - extremely helpful for sales people that can not always be online.
• Integration with existing BI solutions - almost all of our clients have already a BI Infrastructure. Roambi integrates very well.

• 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 system that performs the rendering of data to the front-end can be improved to intelligently read the back end data template or at least the layout. Inserting new rows/columns of data completely messes up the rendering on the front end and the process of re-selecting information to ensure proper rendering is a very tedious one.
• Also, Roambi should have the capability to analyse information in formats other than excel such as word, ppts and/or pdfs. I found the lack of this capability a major hurdle because each time I had to export information into excel to render into a template.

• 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

The only reason we would not renew is if there is something out there that is less expensive that is cross-platform for mobile devices. Our clients are no longer exclusively using iOS, so in order to keep their business, we need to change with them.

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

VERY easy to use. Only limited by how the graphs and data is initially set up.

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).

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

Comparing the mobile capabilities of both products - as of course, Tibco Spotfire is a complete solution whereas Roambi focuses on mobility. While some would argue that the ten View (template) limitation of Roambi works in favor of competitors, we have found this to be untrue. Users quickly get used to this native interfaces, which are found across the templates. Additionally, the ten available Views cover 99% of the types of reports or insights you'd ever need. If this is not the case, are you sure you are asking the right questions?

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

• positive ROI
• and any analytical tool needs more historical data for accurate analysis, in that case, roambi 's part is as a presenter can't influence the ROI exactly..
• overall objective its a value addition for sap based data analytics and others as well.
• for CIO or analytics people good tool to convince their business users and executives.

Incentivized

• 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