Business Objects Vs

QlikView
A comparative study
Choosing the best business intelligence tool can be a confusing process. There are dozens of
vendors of business intelligence and Big Data analytics solutions whose marketing messages all
sound alike

DENNIS KS, BI Consultant

Dennis KS has almost two years of experience in Business Intelligence, expertise in
SAP Business intelligence & Business Objects and also familiarized with the
reporting tools like QlikView and tableau. He could be the part of SAP
implementation projects and also the part of several analytical projects.

Business Objects Vs QlikView

Table of Contents
Business Reporting ...................................................................................................................................... 2

Business Objects

QlikView

Comparative Study .......................................................................................................................... 3

Informations

Product

Applications

Hardware and Licenses

Technology

Feature Comparison

Strategic Analysis .......................................................................................................... ..11

Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 12

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Business Objects Vs QlikView

Business Reporting
Business reporting or enterprise reporting is "the public reporting of operating and financial data
by a business enterprise," or "the regular provision of information to decision-makers within an
organization to support them in their work."
Reporting is a fundamental part of the larger movement towards improved business
intelligence and knowledge management. Often implementation involves extract, transform, and
load (ETL) procedures in coordination with a data warehouse and then using one or
more reporting tools. While reports can be distributed in print form or via email, they are
typically accessed via a corporate intranet.
With the dramatic expansion of information technology, and the desire for increased
competitiveness in corporations, there has been an increase in the use of computing power to
produce unified reports which join different views of the enterprise in one place. This reporting
process involves querying data sources with different logical models to produce a human
readable reportfor example, a computer user has to query the Human Resources databases and
the Capital Improvements databases to show how efficiently space is being used across an entire
corporation.
SAP BusinessObjects (a.k.a. BO, BOBJ) is an enterprise software company, specializing
in business intelligence (BI). BusinessObjects was acquired in 2007 by SAP
AG a German company. The company claimed more than 46,000 customers worldwide in its
final earnings release prior to being acquired by SAP. Its flagship product is BusinessObjects XI,
with components that provide performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis
and enterprise information management. Business Objects also offers consulting and education
services to help customers deploy its business intelligence projects. Other toolsets enable
universes (the Business Objects name for a semantic layer between the physical data store and
the front-end reporting tool) and ready-written reports to be stored centrally and made selectively
available to communities of users.
QlikTech is a software company based in Radnor, Pennsylvania, World's Fastest Growing BI
tool. With 10.3 customers being added every working day. QlikTech is the provider
of QlikView, business intelligence software. QlikView is a. Is an IN-memory based BI tool
which can be deployed in a week's time. It comes at HALF the TCO and delivers TWICE the
value compared to any OLAP based BI Solution In QUARTER of the TIME
QlikView is the most flexible Business Intelligence platform for turning data into knowledge.
More than 24,000 organizations worldwide have enabled their users to easily consolidate, search,
and visually analyses all their data for unprecedented business insight using QlikViews
simplicity.

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Comparative Study
QlikView is a single integrated tool for ETL, DW, Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Dash
boarding, Reporting, as per the Butler group user takes couple of hours training instead of
weeks taken by traditional OLAP based tools as in the way Business Objects is focusing
on Business intelligence, Score carding, Strategic planning, Budgeting, Forecasting,
Consolidation etc.
Business objects performance is based on Warehouses, as in QlikView warehouse is not
required.
While considering Server/User Licenses both are Named versions.
For Business Objects Web users are unlimitedly configured but in QlikView its limited
with User license.
QlikView uses its integrated Robust ETL to Extract data from multiple data sources and
forms a data repository using its patented Technology (AQL: Associative Query Logic),
and Empowers the customer to be independent of the vendor to create and use analytics,
But Business Objects required building data warehouse, normalization, schema writing,
and creation of cubes.
Both the Reporting tools will shows similarities in Technology wise like Supported
database, Supported Networks etc.
QlikView can connect to all major OLAP cubes like Business objects, and they are not
using any third party tools used in Business Objects like Crystal Reports.
SAP Business Objects BI solutions reduces BI TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by
providing a single, integrated, scalable, highly available, business intelligence enterprise
platform with an award winning service oriented architecture (SOA). Compared to SaaS
BI solutions, the cost of QlikView is higher because of the procurement and maintenance
of the hardware needed for development, QA and production environments, and costs
associated with downtimes. Only when QlikView is compared to on premise BI products
does QlikView have a lower TCO.
SAP Business Objects provides a framework of data extraction and analysis that helps
business leaders make data centric managerial decisions that will help improve the
bottom line and maintain operational stability and efficiency over the long term.
QlikView Applications are constrained by how much RAM can be addressed in a single
hardware box. As a result, QlikView is designed for gigabytes-scale BI applications.
Given a typical 10x compression rate, QlikView performs well on data volumes up to 1020 gigabytes of compressed data. Since QlikView has to bulk load all data to the system
RAM, reloading data is a considerable workload and can take a substantial amount of
time. This limits the practical frequency of data updates in case of larger data volumes.
QlikView often grows inside of a larger organization via small and isolated departmental
deployments. At some point in time, corporate IT will step in and seek to take control.
Consolidating and managing separate QlikView deployments is very difficult and
requires considerable rework. Lastly, QlikView stores its data in proprietary files. If the
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need should arise, the proprietary storage format will complicate the migration of data
and reports from QlikView to other BI products.
Implementing SAP Business Objects BI solutions better streamlines business intelligence
operations by improving the business user information request process.IT department
should spend less time intercepting and interpreting information request. Allow users to
define information requirements, create queries, analyze and share information with less
reliance on IT While QlikView lacks some of the advanced capabilities required for
creating highly formatted reports. QlikView is designed for interactive analysis and not
for report writing. To create a formatted report in QlikView requires the use of macros
and the duplication and maintenance of QlikView objects. Previously created QlikView
objects need to be cloned and placed into a Report Section in QlikView.
Empower business users by providing them the ability to easily create ad-hoc queries and
manage powerful data analysis to obtain deeper business insight regardless of database
platform complexity, But QlikView does not offer the richness of MDX and other logical
query languages provided by traditional on premise BI products. These languages enable
end users to create far more powerful calculations (e.g. via addressing cells position ally
in either a materialized or logical cube) than are possible in QlikView. QlikView
provides a user interface for users to interactively explore and analyze information based
on associations between different data sources. This is a unique approach but because it is
not a logical query language, it has limitations.

QlikView implements in a matter of days, as always. Now, QlikView 8 brings real time
to in-memory analysis. Using newly released APIs, QlikView can have data streamed
into the memory model. Imagine real time stock tickers, and feeds from real-time
systems, while the Business Objects requires more time for the implementation.

Business objects require worrying about versioning - both data versioning, and business
object versioning, As compared with QlikView.
Creates personalized analysis. Users have the ability to create and save their own
personalized QlikViews without impacting the master QlikView. This allows users to
define QlikViews according to their individual needs, analyses multiple scenarios and
refine results until they get the exact answers needed. In BOs require to write
a new object for a new entity - this might not be fully true as design might encourage
reuse, but cannot beat the dataset, in which to setup the object have to write zero code.
QlikView Allows people to work better together. QlikView reports, and secure links, can
now be sent directly via email and server links. People can share their findings with
colleagues, who can then build on that analysis with their own information continually
strengthening the organizations intelligence like as Business Objects.
In SAP Business Objects Lose any enhancements Microsoft may provide with in future
versions of .NET. If in .NET 1.1, shied away from datasets, because of
its serialization problems, probably spent a very long time getting business objects
working. Only to find out that MS fixed it in .NET 2.0, any way QlikView Does not use.
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QlikViews associative data model is designed for deployment speed and for providing
users with an environment that is designed to encourage data exploration. In comparison,
the products of leading BI vendors like Oracle, Micro strategy and Business Objects use
logical dimensional models that are core to BI best practices that have been proven out
over the last 10 years. The reason that QlikView abandons this approach is because
traditionally logical modeling requires much more time to set up and is technically
complex. However, when done properly, it allows more analysis flexibility and power
than associative data models. The Burst approach is to combine the benefits of logical
modeling with the quick time to value realized in a SaaS environment.
While QlikView provides a scripting language for integrating and loading data from
multiple sources into memory, it does not provide advanced ETL capabilities that are
needed for more complicated data integration use cases, like parsing of web log data for
sequence analysis and hierarchy tree navigation also In BOs are not directly data bind
able. Have to write the code to make that happen.
QlikView makes no distinction between columns that are facts and columns that are
attributes. While this is designed to encourage data exploration, it makes the creation of
well-defined formatted reports more complicated and time consuming.
The latest release of QlikView provides a feature that allows organizations to run a script
for continually updating the in-memory data of a QlikView deployment. Previously, this
was not possible but even with this feature, only scenarios where updates to the source
system are infrequent and limited in volume would benefit from this. For fully scalable
real-time analysis and reporting purposes, a BI platform needs to be able to query the
source system or database directly and on demand.
By Comparing with QlikView Concurrency is a bigger pain to manage using BOs. This
refers to both thread concurrency and database concurrency Business objects either
require writing the equivalent of a data adapter, or they encourage filling the object as the
connection is open which severely impacts connection pooling performance. Breaking
this single rule can cause application performance to degrade by about 20 times in a
concurrent environment.

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Feature Comparison:
Features

Business Objects

QlikView

Analytic functionality

Yes

Yes

Bubble up exceptions

Yes

Drill down

Yes

This feature is better handled where

the exceptions are managed at the
lower level and not popped to the
upper layer and confuses the user.
However all precautions are taken to
handle the exceptions efficiently.
Yes

Drill through to source Yes

data
Ranking

Yes

Drill down to the transactional level,

As to the aggregated data in case of
OLAP based applications.
Yes

Sorting

Yes

Yes

Restrict results by
date range
Includes dashboard

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Time trending (for

example, over 12
months)
Pareto filtering
(automatically groups
the categories that
amount to less than
20% of a row or
column total into
"other")
Calculations

Yes

Yes, as many years as the database

holds

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Counts

Yes

Yes

Percentage of total

Yes

Yes

Allocations

Yes

Yes

Total and Sub-total

Yes

Yes

Create OLAP cubes

Yes

NOT Required, saves TIME and MONEY

Data extraction and

transformation tools
Incremental
extraction
Impact analysis -

Yes

Integrated

Yes

Yes

Yes

If want to make changes in the

QlikView script or data source and
want to know the impact of this
change on report objects beforehand,
could be in problem and may have to

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Can schedule process

to run overnight
Formatting

Yes

check each and every report manually

and document it.
Yes

Yes

Yes

By dimension

Yes

Yes, No in Dimension

By level

Yes

Yes

By cell

Yes

Yes

Zero-row suppression

Yes

Zero/Null Field Suppressions

Conditional
formatting by cell,
e.g., highlight cells
below threshold
Returns text (e.g., if
value > 90, returns
"excellent")
French version

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Working Platform
Reports

BO is cross platform, which can run in

any operation system
Yes

Unicode: Can be Implemented in any

Language
Only with Widows

Documentation

Yes

Yes

Metadata

Yes

Yes

OLAP functionality

Yes

NOT Required

Skip missing levels support ragged

dimensions
Write back

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

With audit trail

Yes

Yes

Yes

Includes charting tools Yes, about 200s of charts and regional

components
Access multiple cubes Yes
at a time
Excel client
Yes

Yes

Internet Explorer
client
Netscape client

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Geographical
representation
Drag and drop

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Password security

Yes

YES: Up to the field level

By company

Yes

Yes

By department or

Yes

Yes

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Yes
Yes

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Business Objects Vs QlikView

division
By menu

Yes

Yes

By function (view,
add, change, delete)
By dimension

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

By level

Yes

Yes

By cell

Yes

Yes

Respect active
directory
authentication
Respect database
security
Portal generation that
includes HTML reports
Report writer

Yes

Yes

YES: Can be integrated with active

directory authentication for a single
log on per User
Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

NOT Required: Integrated feature

Web-based

Yes

Yes

Generate cube

Yes

Drag and drop

Yes

NOT Required: Overcomes cube

drawbacks
Yes

WYSIWYG report
design
Technology

Yes

Yes

Yes

YES (AQL)

API-enabled (SDK
Yes
provided)
Web-based (only need Yes
browser at client)
For entire application Yes

Yes

Support for .NET web

services
Support for Java web
services
Transfer data to:

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Report writer

Yes

Excel

Yes

QLIKVIEW Is not a report writer

however it supports generating
reports and this feature is integrated
part of QlikView.
Yes

PivotTable

Yes

Yes

HTML

Yes

Yes

PDF

Yes

Yes

PowerPoint

Yes

COPY PASTE (CTRL+C, CTRL+V)

XML

Yes

Yes

Views

Yes

Yes

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Yes
Yes

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Business Objects Vs QlikView

Crosstabs

Yes

Yes

Charts

Yes,

Yes

Both crosstabs and

chart at the same
time
Work flow

Yes

Yes

Yes

Open to function with third party tools

Alerts can be
automatically
triggered

Yes

YES, In the form of popups and can be

used to automate sending of mails,
active/run other applications.

Limitation/Scalability
over Data

Has Proven itself capable of handling

hundreds or even thousands of users at
once

Ad-Hoc Capability

Mobile Reporting

Allows users to generate their own

"reports" or "analytics" without
IT/analyst assistance
Has very strong metadata management
capability
Provides an array of different tools that
can be used in different ways to achieve
different goals or meet requirements
from different user types, from speedy
simple analysis (pole star) to complex
dimensional analysis (voyager) to
dashboards to reporting.
Yes

QlikView is an in memory BI tool with

a limitation of the amount of data
based on the RAM size; whereas other
tools are highly scalable.
Poor Ad-Hoc Analysis

BO Explorer

Yes

No

BI Widgets

Yes

No

Pixel Perfect
Reporting
IT Dependency

Yes

No

Minimum, users need not be completely

depend upon IT Team for any new object
or field insertion. Universe solves the
purpose here
BO provides Semantic layer between
Backend database and front end reports
which simplifies the complexity of the
database by mapping technical
terminology to user's usual business
terminology
Business Objects also have Live office as
a plugin which enables users to import
Webi report into excel without actually
logging into info view

High, Users needs to call or depend on

IT team if they need new object or
field in a report or in a chart

Metadata
Management
Tools

Semantic Layer

Live Office
Connectivity

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Lack of Meta Data management

Provides a single tool for all users,
meaning less training and
implementation time and a more
intuitive interface, but can't adapt to
specific user needs

No

No semantic Layer

No live office Connectivity

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QuAWS

Export data or
metadata to XML
Multi User
development
environment
SQL Generation
Resolving circular
loops and Traps
User based and Role
based Security
Real time analysis and
Reporting
Data Modeling

Hardware
Maintenance

Complicated logics can be put on to the

Does not have Universe
Business Objects Universe making it easy
for users just to select the objects and
creating their own reports. These reports
can be saved, scheduled or used in a
dashboard
Yes
No
Yes

No

Possible

If want to see the SQL generated

behind a query, can't see in Qlik View
Aliases only

Contexts & Aliases

Graphical interface to implement user
based & role based
Yes

No

Logical, Logical modeling needs much

more time to set up and is technically
complex. However when done properly,
it allows more analysis flexibility and
power than associative data models.
Very low

Associative

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No

Very high as Qlik View Uses in memory

concept, loads all the data &
information in its RAM thus leads to
much bigger hardware cost

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Business Objects Vs QlikView

Strategic analysis

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Summary:
Choose QlikView if:

Rapid Time to Value.

No need to pre builds a Data warehouse. If dont have one, will not need it.
Queries with sub second responses, achieved with In-Memory Data.
Enable users to explore data from less detail (more aggregated data) to transaction level
(detailed data).
High interactive Dashboards.
One Single Product for ETL, Development and End User Analysis.
Empower Users with the ability to create their own analysis with their own data.
Choose BO if:
Want to expend lot of time and money building a data warehouse and that is not a
problem in project. Connecting BO directly to production database could seriously
impact performance.
Also have a dedicated DBA to manage the data warehouse.
Users need to create static Reports, not dynamic Analysis.
If already a SAP customer, maybe they gave the software for free. But still need to pay
a lot of consulting.

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