SAP BI is exactly what one might expect from a company whose primary applications serve the administrative needs of large organizations. The BI offerings are large, somewhat monolithic, not particularly user friendly and, depending on configuration, can be fairly expensive. As something of an appetizer SAP has recently introduced Lumira, a data visualization tool that can access Excel data and provides a drag and drop interface. Best of all Lumira is free. So there are signs at least that SAP BI is moving with the times.
BusinessObjects is the primary BI offering from SAP. It embraces several modules for integration with MS Office, for processing OLAP data, for BI with a web interface, dashboards, mobile applications – and so on. The full list of modules looks like this:
- SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office
- SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for OLAP
- SAP Crystal Reports
- SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence
- SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
- SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards
- SAP BusinessObjects Mobile App
- SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
- SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Mobile App
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, analytics edition
- SAP BusinessObjects Live Office
- Business Intelligence Solutions for Small and Medium Enterprises
- Location Intelligence
Obviously this is a large product and it is not particularly well known for its ease of use or cost effectiveness. Organizations with a large investment in SAP technologies may choose to go this route, but there would seem to be few other reasons to do so. It will of course do everything a large organization might want to do and embraces contemporary notions such as dashboards, self-service BI and mobile BI. It also provides a solid foundation for enterprise BI, but it is large and maybe a little bit clumsy. On the plus side the BI environment shares a common interface with other analytics tools, although SAP has recently acquired KXEN and it remains to be seen how tightly integrated this will become with other SAP products.