Sign in
Sign in
or
Create a new account
Agent Mode
Categories
Your Saved List Become a Channel Partner Sell in AWS Marketplace Amazon Web Services Home Help

SAP BusinessObjects 5 Named Users - STANDARD

Protiviti, Inc.

Reviews from AWS customer

3 AWS reviews

External reviews

238 reviews
from and

External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.

4-star reviews ( Show all reviews )

    Trevor H.

Great software for analyzing large data and tailoring reports.

  • July 26, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
I have used Business Objects for years and the updates only get better. Tailoring a large amount of data to an easy to understand report is critical for our business. The amount of available filters allows for extremely detailed reports and have proven very helpful to the Consultants who receive them.
What do you dislike about the product?
Depending on the size of your report, run times can be a little long.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Large data analysis. Streamlined reports. Increased communication and problem resolution.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you have a large set of data and need to filter it in a number of ways for meaningful reporting, this is the first and best tool to choose.

    Computer Software

Strong reporting framework for all users

  • June 28, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
SAP BO provides a strong reporting framework, best suited for report writers, but palatable to new reporting analysts and consumers.
What do you dislike about the product?
SAP products are some of the priciest on the market and the price point can deter clients from implementing reporting solutions.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Healthcare and RCM reporting. Benefits include the ability to train and certify a reporting analyst within just a matter of weeks.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
There are several reporting solutions on the market that are giving SAP a run for their money. Consider all possible options before investing in a long-term reporting solution.

    αηκit s.

Business Objects gives organizations a set of tools to manage and optimize Business Intelligence

  • June 28, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
With its consolidated approach, SAP Business Objects gives organizations a set of tools to manage and optimize Business Intelligence. From a centralized portal, companies handle everything from ETL and data cleansing to predictive dashboards and a variety of reports - Crystal Reports, OLAP, and ad hoc. SAP Business Objects provides solutions for medium to large enterprises, and is configurable to a number of industries, including manufacturing and distribution, financial services, and nonprofits.

SAP is one of the leading companies in the business intelligence industry.
The seriousness and professionalism of SAP is maximum, the products are highly professional and suitable for large companies wanting to establish a comprehensive BI solution structured and well-functioning.
Through SAP Business Objects you can independently develop highly professional products business intelligence, creating optimal and detailed reports, dashboards attractive, and OLAP structures by connecting to different heterogeneous data sources.
What do you dislike about the product?
SAP Business Object surely is not a product that can be developed by inexperienced users, can certainly be used by intermediate users following a minimum of necessary training.
My least favorite thing about this product would have to be the lack of download capability in more current versions of Excel. Currently, Business Objects only downloads in Excel 2007 format, which can sometimes complicate pulling millions of rows of data into one spreadsheet. Office 2010 and 2013 are capable of handling millions of rows of data, but B.O. cannot deliver it into those new formats.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Evaluate thoroughly, your need for building data universes or data marts to simplify your users report construction. We went through many data modeling sessions where we worked on the construction of the marts and linked them so that the seemingly disparate data could be joined together to yield very meaningful reports. The better you build your models and marts, the faster your reports will run.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Depending on your needs and depending on your budget available, carefully consider your goals before you start a process of development and maintenance of a Business Intelligence infrastructure.

    Viral S.

visual strong tood - business boject

  • June 21, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
OLAP analysis, webi and lumira are best in all BO tools
What do you dislike about the product?
Xcelsius should be much developer friendly and should be accessible smoothly from different data sources
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
many critical reports with having huge complex formula are created in Webi

    Information Technology and Services

Good solution for business intelligence and reporting

  • June 15, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Dashboard, BI , crystal reports.
Specially customizing a report for the customer and work flow with business studio.
What do you dislike about the product?
Setup for starting and settings for dashboard.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Report customization, work flow authorization
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Easy setup and installations.

    Margaret P.

Easy to use and seamless integration

  • June 14, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Business objects is easy to use to view, sort and analyze business intelligence transactional data. The query focus is seamless. Overall visualization tools are OK.
What do you dislike about the product?
The drag and drop functionality provides a minimum restriction at times. Visualization can sometimes be a bit difficult to use.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Main focus is sales optimization. The analytics performed using Business Objects have provided sales insight for products and services.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Use the trial and play around with it.

    Ramez B.

Powerful Analytical Capabilities!

  • June 08, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Highly interactive dashboards including drill-through, conditional formatting and complex filtering
Completely flexible WYSIWYG layouts
Wide range of input controls available for what-if analysis
Dashboard and application can published to BI Platform, HANA and NetWeaver Platform
What do you dislike about the product?
More of a developer’s tool where the dashboards are shared with the business users
Demands a specific skillset to operate
Time consuming process to build new or modify the existing ones.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
An IT authoring tool with HTML5 UI technology that provides predefined graphical dashboards and analytic applications to multiple business users.
Real time analysis with live data and Multi Language Support.
Customer- and SAP-delivered content
HANA support and Mobile Support.

    Education Management

An easy way for someone to pull data who is not very familiar with writing complicated queries.

  • May 27, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
I like that it is easy to use and very user friendly. It does not take long to become familiar with the layout. The quality of the end product is well worth the time it takes to learn this system.
What do you dislike about the product?
I dislike that it is not as versatile as writing sequel code.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It helps you understand where to focus marketing initiatives to increase revenue.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I recommend that you know your purpose before using it. Don't go into it and hope you figure something out as you go.

    Pharmaceuticals

Good Tool for Reporting

  • April 27, 2016
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
able to create and modify custom reports, set up auto delivery schedule to others.
What do you dislike about the product?
difficult to work in, especially if you don't do it frequently.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
custom data reports from multiple systems.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Great tool for compiling data from multiple systems.

    Paul Grill

Using Xcelsius dashboard instead of Qlikview

  • January 05, 2014
  • Review provided by PeerSpot

When I first started presenting Xcelsius dashboards back in 2006, I said that it should carry a warning sign stating “May Cause Xtreme Xcitement”!

Despite all the advances in technology and tools over the last decade that statement not only remains true today, but maybe should be changed to “Will Cause Xtreme Xcitement”.

In the last month, I have both seen and heard stories from companies singing the praises of Xcelsius and hailing it as the savior of BI user adoption in their organizations.

A company specializing in reporting and analysis of employee business travel was looking for a client facing BI application that would help sell their solution. The client showed me their current solution running in Qlikview bemoaning how rigid, limiting and unexciting it was to use. They then showed me an example of something they found on the web that was an animated PowerPoint dashboard much closer to what they were looking for. Of course, I recognized it as an Xcelsius dashboard embedded in PowerPoint immediately. It had been developed over seven years ago, but it still sizzled. So, we mocked up a new prototype in Xcelsius for the client and to say they loved it would be an understatement. The VP of Marketing came up with the best quote of the day when he said, “It’s alive!”

A multi-national vehicle leasing company developed a super cool Xcelsius dashboard for improving their vendor management with built-in location intelligence using the GMaps plug-in and the InfoBurst XML Data Caching for high data volume performance. They presented it at their annual sales meeting last month and it stole the show. The excitement generated was so contagious, the VP and Director responsible spent the evening at the bar designing the next dashboard together! (I can’t wait to see that one!).

A new finance director of a global software company needed a way to provide better visibility to their financial statements and reports. She remembered using Xcelsius many years ago and said it really helped then. We put a prototype together for her in a day and everyone loved it, so they are buying it next week.

So why is Xcelsius so amazing and still slaying the BI data visualization competition everywhere? There are dozens of reasons from its ease of use, animations, ability to embed in everything, fast prototyping to its “what if” scenarios and cool components. But it goes deeper than all these features which you can also find in other BI visualization tools. The real secret to the success of Xcelsius is that it was initially designed and developed by computer gamers. To develop a winning computer game, you need to engage your audience visually, make it cool and fun to use and have limitless possibilities. You can find all these elements in Xcelsius dashboards allowing you to create killer BI applications.

That is why Xcelsius dashboards is still the best show in town. Xcelsius lives!

Update Nov 2015 : Lots of activity around Xcelsius HTML5 for deployment on mobile and on desktop with dCode add-on (www.getdcode.com). Now that Xcelsius generates HTML5 output, I see it being around for many, many more years

Update April 2016 : Xcelsius continues to thrive with many organizations using and deploying it for the first time in 2016. SAP provided updates to it with latest BI 4.2 release including full support for Excel 2013

Update Sept. 2016 : Xcelsius HTML5 definitely seems to be the dashboard solution of choice and many new add-on HTML5  components are becoming available including D3 charts, flat components and query drag and drop discover.

Update Sept 2018 : Adobe announced end of life for Flash for Dec 31, 2020 and SAP announced it would no longer support Xcelsius after this date since the development client uses Flash. While some Xcelsius users are looking for a viable alternative solution, others vow to continue to use the tool regardless. There are some new Xcelsius compatible solutions in development so let's see what materializes in the coming months.

Update Feb 2019 : Xcelsius still heavily in use. Some companies looking to replace with Tableau or PowerBI but just not the same. Web Intelligence dashboards may be a viable alternative for simple dashboards .

Update July 2019 : SAP has announced it will no longer support Xcelsius after Dec. 31, 2020 to coincide with Adobe no longer supporting Flash in the browser. However, most Xcelsius users have been generating HTML5 dashboards for a number of years now and are continuing to do so and their Xcelsius HTML5 dashboards should not be affected. SAP has no equivalent follow-on product and is recommending customers move to SAC (cloud only) and rewrite their dashboards - this will require programming skills . An alternative to Xcelsius, called Squirrel,  that requires no training for an existing Xcelsius developer and has a built-in XLF migration utility is due for beta release by InfoSol in October and will be GA in December.

Update Dec 2019 : Squirrel has been in beta for the last few weeks with multiple organizations and is scheduled for general release on Dec 31. Initial feedback is very positive with Xcelsius users who require no re-training to use it. They have been able to both migrate or recreate existing Xcelsius dashboards. This is great news for the Xcelsius community who now have another option when Flash goes away and SAP stops supporting Xcelsius in 2021.

Update May 2020 : Squirrel is now at version 1.3 with multiple Xcelsius customers having converted their dashboards and running with the Squirrel HTML5 versions in production. This appears to be a very viable path forward for those customers left with Xcelsius Flash dashboards that will probably no longer work starting in 2021.

Update Nov 2020 : Squirrel 1.6 which has a cloud based version and allows you to embed dashboards in PPT was just released last week. More and more Xcelsius customers have now successfully moved to Squirrel and companies like Salesforce are using it too. Xcelsius has about a month to go before Adobe and SAP stop all support.

Update June 2022 : Squirrel365 has now replaced hundreds of Xcelsius dashboards and has become the de facto follow-on solution for Xcelsius

Update May 2024 : Squirrel 365 can now be embedded in BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, Tableau and PowerBI bringing "What If" scenarios and write back capability to these traditional BI solutions

Update November 2025 : Squirrel365 now has AI capabilities for both chatbot and functional AI using Open AI. It can also access your existing AI models. There is also a new add-on dScover AI that allows naturual language questions to be asked against data loaded into an in-memory data cache. This now meams you can embed both AI and Write Back capabilities using InfoBurst Squirrel in BusinessObjects, PowerBI and Tableau

Disclaimer: My company is partners with several vendors including SAP BO.

showing 91 - 100