The Mr. and Mrs. Smith Relationship of BusinessObjects and Power BI

About 20 years ago, there was a movie called Mr. and Mrs. Smith starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. It starts off with them visiting with a marriage counselor trying to sort out issues in their stagnant and boring marriage. What they don’t know at the time is that they are both top assassins working for competing agencies, but when they are given the same person to eliminate, they run into each other, and all is revealed.

Then their agencies find out and tell them to assassinate each other which they do try to do.

I won’t go into the rest of the movie, in case you haven’t seen it (and I recommend you do) but it came into my head as I was thinking about the current relationship between BusinessObjects and Power BI.

I have witnessed a lot of organizations bring in Power BI alongside BusinessObjects. It often starts with the two solutions working on different things and different parts of the business. BusinessObjects continues to serve the operational reporting needs while Power BI comes in as the new mega-tool that can do it all. This results, in all new initiatives being given to Power BI while BusinessObjects is put into a holding pattern.

However, the organization starts to find out that Power BI can not do it all and, in some cases can only do part of what the business needs at a much higher cost. This often leads to a stagnant relationship between the two tools and the business not really benefitting.

At this point, the higher-ups get involved and decide that they need to eliminate one of the tools. It’s usually BusinessObjects but because it is doing mission critical reporting for the business, those benefitting will try to eliminate Power BI. They try to assassinate each other – sounds familiar?

Usually, the organization could benefit from both tools but this needs to be carefully planned to reach a productive state of co-existence where you use the best tool for the business need required.

There are things you can do in BusinessObjects that you cannot do in Power BI and vice-versa so why waste time?

Power BI does not have an equivalent to the BusinessObjects universe and semantic layer and probably never will.

Power BI was not created for operational reporting and does it in a clunky way using the separate Report Builder tool (the old SSRS tool).

Power BI is good at data discovery and data visualization allowing dashboards to be created easily and quickly (although BusinessObjects with BI 2025 and BI 2027 is catching up fast).

It therefore makes sense to combine the strengths of each solution and co-exist.

There are tools like InfoBurst Power BI that can actually integrate BusinessObjects and Power BI by pushing BusinessObjects workflows into Power BI semantic models and dramatically speeding up the delivery of Power BI outputs. In addition, it can take parts of BusinessObjects reports and parts of Power Bi reports and combine them together in the same publication.

However, just like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, most organizations have to fight it out first and lose a lot of time and money to figure out that only co-existence and respect for each other’s strengths will create a happy marriage.