The Future of Design Studio Platform Development

As part of our post Design Studio 1.6 roadmap rollout, was something that many people have noticed; that future platform development will be concentrated on the BI Platform.

What this means

• New development is focused on the BI Platform.  This concentration of development resources means that the vast majority of our customers, who are on the BIP, will see accelerated functionality development.

• The other platforms are still maintained; they just don’t get new features.   There has been some confusion on this point, so let me be clear; If a customer is live with a NW scenario now, we’re not pulling the plug on them.  They’ll just have to use the BIP if they want to add a new scenario (e.g. Scheduling or Smart Object) in the future.

• Existing Netweaver and Hana XS server packages will continue to be maintained as per our standard maintenance policy.  E.g. Scheduling, which is currently planned as one of the major 2016 topics,, will also only ever come to the BIP.

• Connectivity to Hana views is unaffected!  Hana is and will remain a flagship data source and we even added the ability to consume attribute views in 1.6.  Only the location where the .biapp file is stored and served from is affected.
  

Why we made this decision

It is no accident that we actively seek customer feedback on our roadmaps, so that we can prioritize the functionality most desired by our customers.  The choice of a server platform, or multiple server platforms is one of these cases.  Let’s step back in time a few years, to the early days of Design Studio.  One of Design Studio’s earliest roles was to be a “better BEx”.  If one were to survey our customer landscape then, they would see no clear consensus as to which platform was preferred.  A majority of our customers used the BIP then, but a plurality of customers were using pure Netweaver environments.

Now, three years later, we are looking at a changed customer landscape.  Most Design Studio customers who were running pure Netweaver landscapes now use the BIP for a variety of reasons. At least 90% of our customers worldwide use the BIP.  Having such a clear a platform consensus means that we can feel comfortable concentrating development on that one platform.  We have a responsibility to our customers, to build a better Design Studio for the largest possible number of customers and rather than slowly develop functionality on multiple platforms, we can maximize progress where the customers are.

Concentrating new functionality development on the BIP means that the 90% will see accelerated functionality development.  The rest can continue with their existing scenarios.  We’re confident that the improved functionality will also entice them to make the switch.