Standing at the cross roads of the Business Objects journey-PART I
In the last one month I came across the questions and predicament facing a couple of our global customers who were deliberating with the idea of implementing Business Objects on top of their SAP BW landscape.
Scenario-1:
A heavy engineering company is looking at rolling out SAP for its Customer and sales service functions across various service centers in mainland Europe. Along with its SAP ECC roll out it was looking at establishing its analytical platform utilizing SAP BW and Business Objects as the front end. It intends to start work the project from the next month. It is at a cross roads and trying to decide on whether it should go ahead with BO version 3.1 or go with the brand new version 4.0.
Scenario-2:
A large US based logistics company is already on a SAP BW BEx platform and had decided to migrate to a Business Objects reporting suite. It went ahead with performing a pilot of moving a few reports and dashboards to BO using version 3.1 and is now ready to launch the full program. However now it is trying to determine whether it should go ahead with the version 3.1 or move the pilot to version 4.0 and then perform the migration.
Both organizations are facing their moment of truth and am sure that they not in isolation. There would be many more corporations trying to navigate through this situation and making the best out of it. Let us try to understand the typical questions that are arising out of the situation:
· The first and foremost question running in the mind would be on whether BO 4.0 would be in General Availability within the next one month or would there be further delays?
· BO 4.0 promises to provide a much more seamless integration with SAP BW backend. Would the product be living up to its promise?
· Should I decide to go ahead with integrating BO3.1 with BW for now and decide to move to BO 4.0 or higher later, how much would be the migration efforts?
· Would SAP be protecting my investments on BO 3.1 and BW should I decide to go ahead with 3.1 or would I be again asked to move to 4.0 in the immediate future?
· Would I be better off waiting for a BO version 4.1 or higher?
I am sure there would be quite a few more that could as well be on the above list but I have tried to capture the most popular questions that we are facing with some of our clients who are looking at adopting BO in the immediate future.
Whereas there are no straight forward answers to the above questions we could definitely work out a strategic fit to decide on whether an organization should look at moving with 4.0 or start with 3.1.
In the subsequent blog I will try to delve into key differentiators of the two versions of Business Objects and the considerations that should drive the decision of choosing between them
