TM1 Forum

Hi All

I am trying to get some information together which compares TM1 Ver 9.1 to Business Objects.Apart from the obvious ones such as "no write back capability for Business Objects" does anyone have any presentations, articles etc which they could share with me on this subject.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Armand

I don't have anything but I would say that they are two very different tools. BO is used for extracting large amounts of information from a database. It's effectiveness can depend heavily on the design of the database. If the database is fragmented and difficult to join BO will have problems. TM1 however is an OLAP tool for a start (BO claims to be OLAP but it isn't). It can be used to extract information from a database but it does not rely on the database design and data can be brought together within it when the DB design is bad. On top of that TM1 has a calculation engine that can be used to calculate both planning information and aditional calculated KPI's.

I would say that is good for extract information from large databases, and that's about it. TM1 offers so many other options,

Jim.

PS. As you have to buy BO bit by bit it also lots more expensive.

You won't find articles easily because BO is a different world. It may be OLAP - it builds so called "microcubes" internally, but it is completely based on relational tables (ROLAP). You can build simple hierarchies in BO (e.g. Product - Product Subcategory - Product category), but it will be difficult to display a complex chart of account structure (ragged hierarchy).

Of course BO is a complete BI suite and has a product 'Voyager' (in the past OLAP Intelligence) to connect to multidimensional sources (MSAS, Essbase, SAP BW) but it is not very widely spread. In this case it is only a frontend. There is a product 'BO planning' (former SRC) as well to write back data to relational tables in SQL Server or Oracle.

You should well determine the range of use for your BI tool in scope.

Regards,

Marcus