Thursday, November 6, 2025
October 2025 SAP Analytics Business Intelligence Statement of Direction (SOD)
The new Statement of Direction gives SAP BusinessObjects enthusiasts even more confidence that SAP will continue its support for the venerable platform into the foreseeable future.
The October 2025 SAP Analytics Business Intelligence Statement of Direction (SOD), compared to earlier SODs, focuses heavily on SAP BusinessObjects, right from the first sentence: "This document provides guidance to our SAP BusinessObjects customers on product directions for SAP analytics solutions."
While the SOD positions SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Business Data Cloud as the future of SAP analytics, it recognizes "SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform (SAP BusinessObjects BI) equips thousands of companies which reliably manage enterprise reporting use cases at scale."
The SOD then turns to the "new" maintenance strategy, but there is little to no change here from the July 2025 SOD.
Web Intelligence Enhancements
Perhaps the most significant change of direction in the SOD concerns the sunset of Lumira Discovery after BI 4.3. In past SODs, this sunset was portrayed as a strong reason to move your BI workflows to SAP Analytics Cloud. In this SOD, the Lumira Discovery sunset is used to make the case for Web Intelligence enhancements that "provide an on premise alternative for self service data preparation and dashboarding use cases."
These enhancements include:
- Expanded data preparation capabilities
- Enhanced analytical reporting capabilities
- New offline access with the Web Intelligence Document eXtract (WIDX) format
- Improved efficiency through a user-friendly interface
The SOD commits SAP to incremental improvements to Web Intelligence, including:
- Enhanced ad-hoc data preparation
- Dynamic layout with responsive content and tailored user experience
- Advanced visualizations for dashboard and application creation (WIDX compatible)
- Cohesive look and feel across reports through theme creation and templates
For more complete desc riptions of these new and upcoming features, review the SOD here.
Watch our webinar featuring SAP's Eric Fenollosa and Gregory Botticchio on demand here.
Read a summary of this webinar on the SAP Community Network here.