Update Statement of Direction SAP Analytics BI – Q2 2021

The SAP Business Intelligence Statement of Direction (SoD) is our public guidance for the strategic product directions of SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects. It is focused on business intelligence. The SoD got some important updates this month and can be found here.

A lot of things are currently happening in the analytics space. We see a steep increase of running analytics in cloud environments now. Covid accelerated this shift to cloud even more.

Our customers are very well suited with SAP Analytics Cloud to onboard cloud analytics. It’s unique in combining business intelligence, planning and predictive analytics in one solution. SAP Analytics Cloud is our flagship analytics product and the bulk of our innovations for the coming year are here.

SAP BusinessObjects users can use the various hybrid scenarios to gradually move over to SAP Analytics Cloud. For those SAP BusinessObjects customers who want to continue using the product but also would like to onboard cloud, we now have SAP BusinessObjects Private Cloud Edition (PCE), which will evolve and be maintained as described in the addendum to the SoD. We ensured that SAP BusinessObjects PCE will be supported beyond 2027. This will be as PCE mode, whereas the maintenance of the on-premise version of SAP BusinessObjects ends after 2027. We also ensured SAP BusinessObjects on premise customers can easily switch to SAP BusinessObjects PCE. Definitely contact your local SAP representative to discuss this.

So, what are the other key highlights of this updated Statement of Direction? Next to SAP BusinessObjects PCE, we introduce investments for the additional user persona of the Information Worker for SAP Analytics Cloud. This comes with great new functionality like the upcoming Watchlist but also investments in data wrangling, automated insights, and a unified self-service exploration experience.

SAP Analytics Cloud also gets additional investments on the level of enterprise readiness. Performance improvements will come with Optimized Story Viewer and Designer, and there is the New Model and improved reporting functionality.