SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and Voyager: When Should You Use Each?

by Praveen Misra, BI Architect and Advisor in CSCI and Co-Founder of Bizsolmarketplace.com (July 2009)

SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects Voyager offer different ways to approach reporting. Find out how these two front-end options compare and who the target user is for each one.

Categories: Reporting, SAP BusinessObjects, Web Intelligence

Key Concept

SAP BusinessObjects Voyager is front-end analytical reporting software that reads data from InfoCubes. Users can easily create workspaces with multiple slice-and-dice options. SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence is another front-end reporting software that you can use for online and offline ad hoc reporting.

Most companies that use SAP NetWeaver BW have multiple data warehouse tools for staging data. They can find it hard to deploy common front-end solutions to end users. Furthermore, reporting challenges arise when they have SAP NetWeaver BW running in parallel with other data warehouse solutions. For example, BEx and SAP NetWeaver Portal can fetch and read data from an SAP data warehouse. If you also have a non-SAP data warehouse — such as SQL 2005 or Oracle — you need another front end, such as Cognos or Hyperion. Deploying multiple solutions not only adds more complexities in the landscape, users also find it hard to learn the tools, so companies end up having silos of applications.

However, if you already have SAP BusinessObjects, you can consolidate your front-end software. Two of the most common options for this purpose are SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects Voyager. You can save time three ways by using these applications. First, less training time is required for users because they do not need to learn separate applications for multiple data warehouse solutions. Second, using a familiar front end avoids user confusion and results in fewer change management issues. Finally , the implementation time for an SAP BusinessObjects front end is relatively short compared to an SAP NetWeaver front end. I’ll show you how these two options compare and explain when you should consider using each option.

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