SAP BW 3.1 Review

OLAP REPORT REVIEW: SAP BW 3.1

Author: Nigel Pendse Released: 2003 Pages: 35 Single User Price: Available only as part of a subscription to The OLAP Report An in-depth product evaluation and rating SAP’s Business Information Warehouse. The world’s largest applications vendor is starting to have an impact in the OLAP market. If you are tempted to use BW as the BI toolset of choice because you are current user of SAP systems, you should first read The OLAP Report review to understand the full implications of this choice. The evaluation goes to the heart of the BW paradox. SAP's business information warehouse, or BW, offers a great many advantages. But these are balanced by a whole range of disadvantages. This thorough, 31-page evaluation of SAP's product tells you about both sides of the BW story. Most importantly, it teases out the implications for users. Technically, BW has a great deal going for the product, not least its close integration with R/3. The review highlights BW's many strengths including: Database capacity - limited only by cost and performance factors Excellent support for 32 and 64 bit Unix and Windows platforms Good client support. BW also provides a range of useful features that support financial applications. However, the review also shows where the software falls down in terms of usability. Balancing the software's technical strengths and functionality is a degree of complexity and performance problems that represent considerable barriers to user acceptance. The OLAP Report examines all of the key issues that will enable you to evaluate the performance of BW against competitor products. A sample of the numerous specially generated screenshots from this review. Click to enlarge.

Contents: Introduction Options for deploying BI using SAP data Vendor overview Product commercial issues Pricing Database structure and capacity Architecture and platforms MOLAP storage Data access functionality Calculation functionality Reporting flexibility Automatic detection of exceptions Time series intelligence Currency support Security and DBMS issues End-user human factors Application building features Performance Conclusions and score Ask a question about this product? Other customers also purchased: BusinessObjects Review Cognos PowerPlay Review Email a colleague about this product

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