Why use cognos or business objects on top of BW?

[Former Member]

Hi all,

Has anyone experience with using cognos, business objects or other best of breed reporting solutions on top of BW? I'm trying to find out in which situations the reporting capabilities in BW are not sufficient and what the main reasons are to choose for an additional tool like cognos. And where can I find a good tool comparison?

Regards, Pieter

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Pieter,

In one project I have to use Cognos on BW because with it is possible to dowload subset of Cubes on a mobile for the sales team, and then navigate off-line.

In one project I considered to use BO XI2 for a front-end reason and also because with this tool I was able to connect to R/3 and BW in the same time, obtaining operative report based on actual and historical data.

Ciao.

Riccardo.

[Former Member]

Hi Pieter:

I find different situations where clients use other reporting tools on top of SAP BW. Tools as Cognos, Business Object, MicroStrategy, etc...

A good comparisons source of info are Ovum or Gartdner...

With the last version of SAP BW (7.0), included into NetWeaver2004s platform, and the use of SAP Analytics, the distance between these competitors and SAP BW is not so big.

I hope it helps.

Norge

[Former Member]

Pieter,

Being familiar with BO, i would like to add my 2 cents.

The new version of Business Objects (XI sr2) has the ability to connect to an Infocube via OLE DB.

In addition, using Olap Intelligence (the new OLAP viewer) you can browse multidimensional structures)

Why prefer it over Bex? a number of reasons:

1. In BO you have an inherent ability to create complex variables (formulas in BW), user objects (virtual key figures/chars, complex calculations etc'.

2. BO has a very trivial and powerful security mechanism.

3. BO features the "universe" which is a semantic layer that might help you to rename infoobjects, create additional custom calculations etc' without having to do it in the query level.

Why prefer Bex?

1. BO licenses costs extra money.

2. You need to learn, implement and support a new tool, and that's not always trivial.

I heard that www.biscorecard.com delivers front end tool comparison for a fee.

Hope this helps,

Gili