Straight Talk: Yurbi Vs Business Objects; Strengths and Weaknesses

Knowledge is power; that’s the philosophy that fuels our unique approach to Customer Success at 5000fish. We believe the more you know about your business intelligence (BI) options, the better prepared you’ll be to choose a BI solution that will help your organization become more successful- and your success is our goal. So when you contact us we’ll talk to you about what Yurbi has to offer, but we are also glad to give you our honest thoughts about the pros and cons of other BI solutions, like SAP Business Objects.

If you’re looking for a business intelligence tool to help take your organization to the next level, this short article is a great place to start. Read on and familiarize yourself with two powerful, yet different business intelligence tools: Yurbi and SAP Business Objects.

Yurbi and SAP Business Objects: Two fundamentally different BI tools.

Before we outline the strengths and weakness of Business Objects and Yurbi, it’s important to understand that the two solutions are fundamentally different. Business Objects is a traditional BI solution (often referred to as a legacy BI solution), while Yurbi is an agile BI solution. Whether a traditional or an agile solution is best for your organization depends on several factors, including your budget, technical know-how, and your use case- meaning what you’re trying to solve or improve by leveraging a BI tool. If you’d like to learn more, read this helpful blog post, Agile BI vs. Traditional BI: Which is Best for My Business?

1. Scalability
   As an enterprise reporting tool, Business Objects is designed to serve the needs of large organizations, and that includes offering nearly endless scalability. In fact, scalability is one of the primary reasons big businesses choose Business Objects as their BI tool. Yurbi wasn’t designed to serve the needs of huge organizations, but it will effectively scale with most small, medium and large businesses as they grow. One of Yurbi’s perks is that you can start small, and buy more user licenses as you need them; there’s no pressure to buy more than you need.
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2. Cost
   When it comes to initial, as well as lifetime costs, Business Objects and Yurbi are worlds apart. From what we know, you’ll pay at least $50,000 to purchase Business Objects (at the very minimum). And some organizations spend millions of dollars on Business Objects. Tack on developer salaries and 18-20 percent yearly maintenance expense, and it is clear Business Objects is not priced for the small or medium-sized business. Moreover, even for large businesses, its expense may exceed its benefits. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reveals that more than 40 percent of organizations surveyed stated cost as a reason they have not expanded deployment of Business Objects within their organization¹.

Yurbi takes a simple, predictable and transparent approach to pricing. User licenses start at just $250 per month for 5 users, and that includes every feature Yurbi offers. Additionally, because Yurbi is designed for business users (not developers), costs associated with implementation, deployment, training and maintenance are less than with Business Objects. Learn more about Yurbi’s pricing model.

3. Integration
   Business Objects can connect to a variety data sources such as OLAP, and XML. It can also connect to any number of integration points like SharePoint, Java, Microsoft Office and .NET. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant states that integration with enterprise applications is one of the key reasons many large organizations select SAP as their BI provider.  It’s also one of the reasons that so many software vendors embed Business Objects with their software. Yurbi doesn’t connect to as many data sources as Business Objects, but it offers connectivity with any ODBC data source as well as the ability to import Microsoft Excel and CSV data files.   Yurbi also has pre-built integrations with major software vendors including BMC Remedy ITSM, HP Service Manager, ServiceNow and more.   And with a 100% HTML5 interface, Yurbi is a great choice for software vendors looking to embed dashboards and reporting into their solution or even brand a complete BI toolset for their solution.
4. Resources
   Backed by a well-established company with a solid reputation and massive financial and technical resources, Business Objects is a formidable player in the world of BI. A recent Gartner report notes that from 2012 to 2013, SAP grew 5.3 percent². Currently, SAP enjoys almost 25 percent market share and more than $3 million in annual revenue. We feel confident that SAP is here to stay and will go through development cycles and invest in their products as necessary. Additionally, due to its popularity, finding a developer trained in Business Objects’ proprietary language is easy. And when your developer needs a question answered, he or she will have a large user community to turn to for answers and advice.

Traditional BI vendors like SAP, Oracle, and IBM dominate the BI space, but the market for agile BI solutions like Yurbi has grown steadily over the last five years. Like many other vendors in its class, Yurbi is relatively new to the market and 5000fish is a small company compared to SAP, but our size and fresh approach to BI offers clients an advantage. Being small means we can take the time to help each customer decide if they need a BI tool, and if they do, we can help them discover how to get the most value from BI. Furthermore, after the sale, Yurbi’s Customer Success team provides a slew of free service and advice that most traditional BI vendors like SAP charge for.

5. Data Discovery

Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant tells us that Business Objects customers use the solution primarily for reporting. The percent of users who leverage Business Objects for interactive discovery or visualization is far below the average for vendors in the Magic Quadrant. This may be due to the fact that business users who want to drill down into data can’t do so- they must count on a developer. With Yurbi, business users have the power to do data discovery. Plus, Yurbi’s drag and drop features allow non-technical users to create their own reports, dashboards and more. In short, Yurbi was developed to put the power of data discovery in the hands of the business user and free them from IT. Business Objects’ users don’t have this power.

Yurbi vs Business Objects: Our Bottom Line

If you’re looking for a highly scalable BI tool that integrates with a number of enterprise applications- and your budget can absorb its initial cost as well as its lifetime cost- you may want to learn more about Business Objects. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a BI solution that offers low initial and lifetime costs, plus gives business users the ability to do data discovery, and boast best in class customer service, then Yurbi could be a viable solution.

As you evaluate the pros and cons of various BI software solutions, keep in mind that no one BI tool will meet every organization’s needs. Your use case, budget and technical resources will play a significant role in determining what business intelligence tool is ideal for your organization. Additionally, you’ll want to take into consideration your customer service needs. What type of relationship do you want with your BI vendor? Are you okay with being one of several thousand customers? Or, do you prefer to work with a smaller vendor who emphasizes the quality of their customer relationships over quantity of them?

We hope this review of Yurbi versus SAP Business Objects shed some light on both solutions. We encourage you to learn about other well respected BI solutions by exploring more straight talk reviews.
¹ Gartner’s Magic Quadrant
² Gartner, 2014