SAP

SAP, from some points of view, isn't a typical company in software industry, because - unlike the vast majority of other companies - it's founded in Germany, not in the USA. Nonetheless, it still is one of the best known companies to deliver comprehensive software solutions for companies. Among many data integration products by SAP, these are main: Data Integrator, Data Sevices, NetWeaver Process Integration, Sybase Replication Server, and Data Sevices OnDemand.

Strengths

• great functionality
• support for bulk-batch ETL, data federation, message-oriented data delivery, CDC
• enhanced support for text processing
• big data support
• depth integration with other products
• vendor support

SAP data integration solution systems are known for their great functionality, including support for most of data integration styles. Customers, who use SAP products, praise it for very good support for bulk-batch ETL as well as for efficient data federation, message-oriented data delivery, and CDC. Finally, there is also significantly enhanced support for text processing, which was missing in previous versions of the solution. SAP is constantly working on the improvements so it's possible to look forward to other misses to be replaced soon.

SAP is known for delivering complex solutions to thousands of enterprises all over the world, therefore it pays a really lot of attention to ensuring its products support for big data on the best possible level. Simultaneously, the integration between different products within the family, resulting in synergic work with data quality and data governance products, is good, what can be considered an advantage for companies which are already familiar with other products delivered by SAP.

From users' perspective, cooperation with such a famous vendor as SAP is another advantage, because its customers, regardless of their location, may count on full support thank to worldwide market existence. What it turns into after all, is improved customer experience, skill base and - on the other hand - benefits for the vendor, which market position becomes hard to question.

Weaknesses

• not enough deep integration within product set
• different integration styles support to be improved
• strong emphasis on ETL-type workloads
• some problems with professional service

Even though the integration between different products, from the operational point of view, is quite good, customers would like to have a common interface which they could use to operate on a few products at the same time. Some products within SAP data integration family have their own functionalities, they work almost separately, and - therefore - they have to be treated rather like a self-deployment than like a part of general suite. Customers point out that finding a common surface of work for all these applications would definitely be a good move by SAP. It could also lead to improve the support for different integration styles, including the most popular metadata models, through design environment, to administrative tooling.

Data Services is SAP's main product for data integration, which the provider places the most attention at. With customer concentration on ETL-type workloads for bulk-batch data flow in Business Intelligence, it restricts the range of use of the system. Especially in comparison to the products of other vendors, SAP's offer seems to have some significant limitations.

Despite the fact SAP's customer support is generally praised, some customers declare that they happen to have difficulties with receiving professional answers to more complicated questions. Even though it might be just a matter of accident, it should not happen to such a famous vendor as SAP.

BusinessObjects Data Integrator

The use of reliable and correct data is crucial for the business users and requires guarantee of data quality and both proper and constant controls and providing lineage of the data. Delivery of trusted information requires the process of data integration which enables data management to be smoothly performed thanks to e.g. finding sources of data, correcting errors, making changes. BusinessObjects Data Integrator (BODI) is a complex tool which provides a lot of options in data manipulation.

BusinessObjects Data integration process is divided into the following operations:
1. Data unification
2. Data profiling
3. Data auditing
4. Data cleansing

Data unification

BusinessObjects Data Integration lets users operate and make changes in the data quickly and easily. Thanks to the unique and helpful solutions it allows to integrate data from the source to the end-user reports and analysis and is crucial to establish the lineage of the data and changes to the data sources. The possibility of monitoring the whole process starting from the results to the data sources enables to find out directly which data origins from which source. It is useful not only to deliver trusted and reliable information but also to have an outlook on overall architecture.
BusinessObjects Data Integrator makes possible quick and trouble-free updating and creating the universes objects (using the BusinessObjects Data Integrator Designer tool). Those actions are facilitated thanks to specific information (column descriptions, data catalogue information) that is loaded into the universes and which help to build the universes easily. All the changes and the data lineage that are easy to be checked cause reduction of time consumption and labour-intensity of objects management, metadata sharing and updating. But it is not only useful for building or updating universes but the end user can see how their data was transformed.
Another Data Integrator tool provided by SAP BusinessObjects is Data Mart Accelerator for Crystal Reports. It allows to extract data from the Crystal Reports instance to aggregate-aware tables automatically. In addition, owing to creation of a time dimension it is possible to perform constantly trend-based analysis.

Data Profiling

BusinessObject Data Integrator has got a well developed instrument for operating in the design environment. The Designer program can be used for the majority of designing operations such as data mapping, transformations and ETL logics as well as for creating workflow and data flows. The developer who works with the Designer tool can create, preview and configure complex data profiles with minimum of efficiency and time. And what is unique, the developer can view the results before and after they are extracted or transformed without leaving the design environment.

Data validation

Data validation is one of the most essential elements of the trusted information delivery. To provide accurate information is to be sure that there is no erroneous or unreliable data. The BusinessObject Data Integration process helps to identify and then correct or reject incorrectness, NULL value data or out of range data. It is very useful when specific records or column needs to be validated by means of the changed rules.

Data Auditing

Process of data auditing consists in verifying data integrity, especially if the data is read, processed and loaded successfully. BusinessObject Data Integrator allows to build audit statistics in accordance with the specific categories (sum, average or row count) and then confront them with the established business rules.

Data cleansing

With Data Integrator it is possible to maintain data quality through data correcting, standardizing and consolidating. The process of cleansing data is particularly important because of common errors in consumers contact information. According to the data integration process it is possible to validate address information by parsing, matching and merging.