SAP Statement of Direction Business Intelligence

SAP has launched a new Statement of Direction for SAP Business Intelligence

The executive summary of this document is as follows:

“The SAP Analytics portfolio includes SAP Business Objects BI Suite (including Analysis for Office), SAP Business Planning & Consolidation, as well as SAP Analytics Cloud. We provide solutions for a diverse set of customer environments including on-premise, cloud, mixed and embedded analytics deployments. This paper describes our future direction for our Business Intelligence customers.

SAP Analytics Cloud is our strategic direction and is changing the way our customers run their business to help them understand their data in context to make better and faster decisions. The integration of BI, planning and predictive analytics in a single engine allows for a smooth experience and lossless transitions from reporting to simulation to planning and back again, all augmented by machine learning. SAP Analytics Cloud gives everyone visibility on critical information by providing self-service analytics capabilities that extend to a wider audience than ever before, while delivering on the true needs for Analytics in the enterprise: scale, security, and corporate data connectivity.

Analytics without context has less value. As part of SAP’s Intelligent Enterprise strategy SAP Analytics Cloud will be embedded in SAP’s Cloud suite; not only can more users benefit from SAP Analytics Cloud, we also can better meet the precise requirements in each different domain.

As we define the future of SAP Analytics Cloud, we are committed to include a future for our existing SAP BusinessObjects customers. SAP pays great attention to BusinessObjects Suite and will continue to invest in the future of this product. The BOE maintenance extends until 2027 at a minimum, providing maintenance timelines among the longest in the industry.

We are delivering major innovations in the coming year with the BI 4.3 release, and will continue to do so through continued maintenance. As more and more customers run both solutions side by side, we are proposing more interoperability and are working on defining tools and capabilities to help our customers who want to transition their workloads to the cloud.”

The full SAP Business Intelligence statement of direction (SoD) can be found here. The SoD comes with this accompanying FAQ document where one can find answers to additional questions.