Business Intelligence Software

Business Intelligence Software, Tools and Supplier Vendors

Business Objects BI 4.4

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Business Objects (from SAP) BI 4.4 is due to be released in Q1 2022 according to inside sources at SAP.

The next major release of SAP BO is expected to contain a number of major functional enhancements and improvements.

Key new features are expected to be increased analytics and visualations and improved user interface.

Business Objects

SAP Business Objects BI 4.3 beta was relased in Q4 2019.

The new version has met a cautious reception was key users and Business Intelligence Sofware industry watchers.

SAP Business Objects BI 4.4 was relased in June 2020 was welcomed by key users and Business Intelligence Sofware industry experts.

Business Objects

Previous SAP Business Objects Versions can be found here.

The Advantanges and Disadvantages of SAP BO can be summarsed as:

Advantages of SAP BO

  • Ingest data from multiple areas of the business and use them to generate easy to understand reports.
  • Report scheduling is simple and efficient allowing the team to run reports at a variety of different times to suit the stakeholder’s needs.
  • The metalayer takes away some of the complexities of other programs, allowing the end user to interact with the program in a clean and efficient way.

Disadvantages of SAP BO

  • Users have indicated challenges inking up with data in  web portals. resulting in additional, unplanned development time,
  • Older versions had functions which have now been removed, or replaced with less effecient functions. For example the HTML output option.

SAP BO is a leading edge Business Intelligence tool for large and mid size organisatiosn that probably already use SAP as their main ERP solution.

Power BI Review Disadvantages Advantages Pros Cons

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Power BI Review – Power BI is a business intelligence and analytics tool provided by Microsoft. It provides interactive visualisations with self-service business intelligence capabilities.

Microsoft Power BI is a solid and proven BI solution that has a large and growing user base and solid support ecosystem both online and from reputable Microsoft partners and vendors.

Most organisations find they have a lot of data but very little insights and to that end Power BI is a rich and fully featured powerful cloud-based service that helps business users, Management Information owners and data scientists visualise and share insights from their organisations’ data.

Power BI offers the capability to access data from more than 40 different data sources and databases covering everything from SQL2019 to Hadoop and Mongo, Azure and even Spark based architectures.

power bi review

There are two ways of accessing Power BI:

1. Via windows desktop (mainly targeted at developers)
2. Via a cut-down browser version (mainly targeted at Execs and report consumers)

To undertake real data manipulation, analysis and development you will need the Windows version of Power BI.

Microsoft is developing Power BI at a rapid rate and new versions and functionality are being released to keep the product ahead of the game.

There is a wealth of online reporting and visualisation templates that can be used to quickly generate eye catching graphics, maps and data visualisations. These are very easy to use and help non technical users get valuable reports and MI to market quickly. This is one of the key strengths of Power BI over and above other market leaders in this space such as Tableau and Spotfire.

Power BI is easy to use and given it’s vast corporate user base from it’s Microsoft SQL heritage is a real Enterprise Business Intelligence tool.

Power BI also serves well as a Mobile BI tool – ideal for presenting information to one the move senior execs via a range of dashboards and easy to drill down visualisations.

Power BI Pricing

Power BI pricing falls into two brackets; free and paid for.

For the Pro version you can use this for as little as

SAP Business Objects Versions

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The SAP Business Objects versions are outlined below.

The most current SAP BO version is 4.3 and this version is a major release so users should consider migrating to SAP BI 4.3 as soon as possible.

Note that SAP BI 4.2 end of support

  1. End of Mainstream Maintenance: 31.12.2022
  2. End of Priority One Support Phase: 31.12.2024
  • SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.3 (SAP BI 4.3) was Released in June 2020
  • SAP Business Objects

SAP Business Objects

SAP BO 4.4 Release date is pending.

Best Business Intelligence Software 2021

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Best Business Intelligence Software 2021 Vendors and Comparisons – the BI Business Intelligence Software market is a crowded and confusing marketplace.

It can be difficult to navigate the vendor offerings, functionality and pricing and compare these to guide the purchase decision making process.

Best Business Intelligence Software 2021

The Best Business Intelligence Software 2021 based on User and Analyst feedback is :

  1. Power BI
  2. MicroStrategy
  3. Spotfire
  4. SAS Visual Analytics.
  5. Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE)
  6. Sisense.
  7. Qlikview
  8. Tableau
  9. Yellowfin BI
  10. Cognos

Microsoft Power BI is the rising challenger to some of the more established vendors.

Power BI accounts for almost 60% of new Business Intelligence Software purchased.

Power BI Azure Synapse Analytics

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Power BI is a well known and widely used Business Intelligence software tool.

It is widely used often because many users have Power BI because they’re Windows users and Power BI comes with Windows. It’s probably fair to say that users of the Power BI platform often don’t always fully assess the BI tools market since they mostly have what they need in Power BI

Despite Microsoft’s ability to update the Power BI platform on an almost constant basis, its capabilities aren’t always viewed as the most innovative on the market.

This could be about to change with Microsofts introduction of Power BI Azure Synapse Analytics.

Power BI Azure Synapse Analytics aims to integrate data warehousing and data analytics in a single BI cloud service that provides the functionality and tooling from both Microsoft Power BI and Azure Machine Learning.

Azure Synapse Analytics

ASA can be summarised as the next step in the evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse as the diagram below illustrates

Power BI Azure Synapse Analytics

What is Azure Synapse Analytics?

Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service from Microsoft that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on