BusinessObjects Co-Existence: The New Reality

Rajesh Ponnurangam, Infosol© InfoSol 2019

[ Why BusinessObjects Co-existence

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➢ More than 40% of companies using BusinessObjects also use Tableau

➢ About 10% of companies using BusinessObjects also use PowerBI

➢ Both are popular for Self-Service Data Discovery and data visualization▪ Not good solution for BI reporting

➢ BO customers have strong investment in universes and Webi reports• Keep Webi for reporting• Leverage universes and Webi for validated data© InfoSol 2019

[Co-existence Challenges

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➢ Supporting 2 BI Solutions/Tools➢ Limited or no integration➢ Self-service discovery tools usually brought in/sold to the

business without consideration of IT enterprise requirements➢ Poor or re-created data flows➢ Poor or no data governance➢ Risk of anarchy behavior or shadow IT/BI groups emerging

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[Co-existence Needs

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➢ Right tool for the right job➢ Right tool for the right user➢ Collaboration between IT and Business➢ Integration and Leveraging strengths of both solutions

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➢ Access UNX Universes from Tableau Desktop

➢ Create Filters on the Universe

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Pull Model for Tableau

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InfoBurst TabData Cache

➢ Loading Webi report data to XML Data cache

➢ Access Webi Report via Tableau Desktop

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Push Model for Tableau

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➢ Connecting to universe only leverages part of BO

➢ Webi reports with defined business and report logic offers a lot more▪ Better data governance▪ One version of the truth

InfoBurst Tab© InfoSol 2019

WebI to Tableau

A BusinessObjects Tableau Love Affair

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Universe to Tableau

A BusinessObjects Tableau Love Affair

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InfoBurst Tab

TDE File

Reporting Data

UNV/UNX

Tableau Cloud

Tableau On-Premise

Network Drive

BO Tableau Integration Architecture

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A BusinessObjects PowerBI Love Affair

The Future of BusinessObjects : Co-existenceBO and PowerBI© InfoSol 2019

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InfoBurst

Reporting Data

UNV/UNX

BO and Power BI Integration

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Tableau

1. WebI Document and Tableau dashboards can be combined in a single PDF

InfoBurst

PORTAL

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14© InfoSol 2019

[Case Study 1

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➢ Publicly traded commercial property company➢ No Data Warehouse and No BI

➢ All reporting done in Crystal and Excel

➢ POC to prove value of BI➢ Created main BI application for portfolio analysis in SAP BO

Dashboards (Xcelsius HTML5)➢ Created visual interactive drill down reports in Webi➢ Used Tableau for data discovery and ad-hoc dashboards➢ Created SQL Server data mart and created universes on this for

Webi➢ Loaded data into high-speed cache for shared access between

Bo Dashboard and Tableau © InfoSol 2019

[Case Study 2

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➢ Fortune 50 Oil and Gas Exploration Company➢ Many SAP BO Dashboards using High Speed Data Cache

➢ Directive from management to move off Dashboards and use only PowerBI

➢ Cost prohibitive to convert all existing dashboards to PowerBI➢ Used Odata connector of PowerBI to connect to high speed data

cache and redeveloped dashboards only without needing to change any back-end queries from Webi that are feeding the cache

© InfoSol 2019

[Case Study 3

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➢ Large Healthcare Provider➢ Multi-year investment in BO universes and Webi reports

➢ Tableau deployment relatively new and wanted to leverage trusted data from BusinessObjects reports

➢ Tried ODBC connector but did not scale and not reliable

➢ Wanted to better schedule and control Tableau refreshes in batch without throttling Tableau server➢ Limitation of 4 batch processes on core licensed server

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Questions?

18© InfoSol 2019