Re: SAP BW compared to Essbase/SQLServer/Oracle as a Enterprise Data Warehouse & OLAP application

"Andreas Wessner" <canttell_at_yahoo.de> wrote in message news:b079vj$mgcun$2_at_ID-25239.news.dfncis.de...
> You wonder why SAP customers are loyal? I assume that they think stucking
> with the "market leader" is a good thing - SAP products are self running
> although they are far from optimality. Secondly have you ever tried to
image
> what you would tell your boss if you voted for a software costing your
> company a fortune and realizing half a year later that you made a mistake?

Indeed so, but many sites assume that SAP BW must, by definition, be better integrated with R/3 than third party products are, which is not necessarily true. There's also a very long history of ERP vendors (or ledger vendors, as they used to be called) doing a poor job with end-user business applications. Companies like Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects, Comshare, etc have long derived a significant part of their business from providing the flexible analysis and reporting that was promised but not delivered by the supplier of the ledgers. Oracle tried to overcome this by buying the Express business from IRI, and marketing OFA as the standard front-end for Oracle Financials, but this product has been fading.

But, as you say, once a company has spent tens of millions to implement SAP, it's very hard for them to accept that they then need to buy a third party product from a smaller vendor to make the most of it.

Nigel Pendse
OLAP Solutions
http://www.olapreport.com Received on Thu Jan 16 2003 - 16:31:39 CST