SAP Business Objects and SAP Business Warehouse

In this post we are going to introduce two tools used by SAP Company for Business Intelligence, SAP Business Objects (SAP BO) and SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), and we will try to clarify very briefly that relationship with each other.

Maybe, first of all you were wondering what is SAP Business Objects and SAP Business Warehouse.

Business Objects is a business intelligence software tool (which was acquired in 2007 by German company SAP) for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, as well as management of business information. It is a suite of front-end applications that allow business users to view, sort and analyze business intelligence data.

The solution capabilities that SAP BO includes are:

  • Business Intelligence Platform: It will increase responsiveness, reduce IT costs and workload, improve performance, and drive better decision making across the organization.
  • Dashboard and Applications.
  • Data Visualization: on premise, in the cloud, and on the Web.
  • Reporting and Analysis.

The advantages of using Business Objects:

  • Independence from the IT department to generate reports.
  • You do not need specific knowledge in:
    • SQL (Structured Query Language )
    • A relational database (RDBMS )
    • Data structure.
  • Easy maintenance of data.
  • Data collection safely.
  • Access to data easily “semantic layer”, using business terms.

SAP Business Warehouse is SAP’s Enterprise Data Warehouse product. It can transform and consolidate business information from virtually any source system.

SAP BW provides tools for extracting, modeling and aligning data sets and comes with its own set of reporting tools, but ever since the merger with BO, SAP’s reporting strategy has been centered on the BO toolkit.

Relevant business information from both SAP systems and non-SAP applications can be integrated, transformed and consolidated in SAP BW with the tools it provides. SAP BW provides flexible reporting tools to assist in the evaluation and interpretation of data analysis and facilitate distribution. Companies are able to make informed decisions and determine oriented objectives based on this analysis activities.

SAP BO and SAP WH were competitors in the market for a while, so there was (and still is) a lot of common functionality and some differences.

In the image below we can see the position of SAP BW and SAP BO within an infrastructure with SAP systems and no-SAP data.

In conclusion, together Business Objects and SAP Business Warehouse offer you a complete data warehouse solution that enables you to leverage your business information across the enterprise and to your key external constituents via the internet.

The SAP BW extracts data from processes throughout your enterprise and converts that data into meaningful information.

SAP BO provides end users with easy access to data, the ability to analyze and report their findings, and the capability to share their knowledge with other end users in BW’s integrated environment. Business Objects and SAP work closely together to offer customers the benefits of using SAP BO in an integrated environment with SAP BW and of leveraging the SAP BW security and metadata.

The advantages of using SAP BO with SAP BW include:

  • Web-based access and distribution of SAP data
  • Easy-to-use reporting interface
  • Access to all data sources
  • Offline report analysis
  • Advanced report formatting without programming
  • Powerful report distribution capabilities

Finally, we can see the place of SAP in the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms:

If you are interested in and you want to know more, do not doubt in contact us or waiting for new posts.

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