In the previous post, we compared the total cost of ownership between an On-Prem BI deployment vs an SAC deployment. But for a lot of you out there already on a Business Objects 3.x or 4.x deployment, the comparison may not be the most appropriate since the upfront license cost was already spent. How about comparing the recurring cost of a BI deployment between staying with On-Prem vs upgrading to SAC? This is what we are going to explore in this post.
Back to our scenario of a furniture manufacturer that needs to provide a community of 1,000 employees and distributors with real-time access to business critical data for improved decision-making. It is a bit surprising to see that there is not much difference between an On-Prem and an SAC deployment on a recurring basis. Despite having spent an upfront license fees, companies still need to pay for software and hardware maintenance each year and be incurred an administration cost to keep the servers and reporting services up and running everyday in an On-Prem deployment. The SAC deployment recurring cost obviously is the pay-per-use on a monthly and per-user basis.
In a related post, we talked about the differences in features between the two products and also what factors need to be considered when it comes to migrating from On-Prem to SAC. It is also worth mentioning that there are lots of features included in SAC that used to be separate licenses with the Business Objects Suite. So, the cost synergies across the spectrum of BI solutions, comparable recurring cost and the advantage of a much lower software and hardware maintenance cost are all factors that one should consider when evaluating the transition into SAC.
| Features | Business Objects Suite (Licenses Required) | SAC (License Required) |
| Dashboarding | Lumira | SAC Included |
| Ad-Hoc Analysis | Webi | SAC Included |
| Data Exploration | Explorer | SAC Included |
| Excel Integration | Analysis for Office | SAC Included |
| Reporting | Webi, Crystal Reports | SAC Included |
Dataworks SAC pilot
Dataworks offers a pilot program to allow clients to have an understanding of how SAC provide BI over the cloud. We work with the business team to quickly identify the most impactful scenario and demonstrate such within a week’s time.
- Initial User provisioning and role creation
- Business themes template design
- SAC connectivity to existing system
- Creation of one SAC-based data model
- One or two simple-to-medium complexity stories with up to 4 pages
- Training and Knowledge transfer of SAC development best practices and standards
If you are interested in knowing more about our pilot service, just leave your contact information below. Also, you will be given an easy calculator to compare the total cost of ownership and the recurring cost.
