IMHO, SAP Really shot themselves in the foot recently with their announcement that Lumira is no longer on the product roadmap. Just a year ago, they were telling everyone to invest in Lumira, and many companies did, only to be abandoned by SAP this year. It’s frustrating. SAP can’t seem to figure out what they want to be when they grow up.
MichaelWelter 
(BOB member since 2002-08-08)
SAP ruined BOBJ first off by putting more emphasis on Crystal… What were they thinking, they would have been great if they just pushed Crystal out of the picture and kept Deski(for one thing) as the user app of choice. I mean, users are not and probably never going to get away from Excel. Deski made it all work out… With some tweaking no other product would have bested it.
Business Objects should have just stayed Business Objects. I think they would have still been the TOP GUN but… SAP has no clue on what to do with it.
di652 (BOB member since 2005-02-24)
If you pushed Crystal out of the picture in terms of the BI platform, there would be no platform…
ABILtd 
(BOB member since 2006-02-08)
Ignoring the architecture, when talking about the actual, he’s spot on though.
Crystal and Deski\Webi are 2 completely different use cases with some crossover though. Same as the use cases for Lumira (RIP) and Webi are different with some crossover.
ABILtd 
(BOB member since 2006-02-08)
Crystal and Deski are very similar, just implemented differently. There’s not much that can’t be achieved in Deski that can in Crystal for a fraction of the hassle.
In terms of Lumira, why are they canning it? What’s on the roadmap now? Has someone managed to rewrite a Roambi/Xcelsius combo in HTML5? 
You may as well lump Webi and Excel together as a poor man’s dashboarding toolset - Webi wouldn’t be anything without the semantic layer though, which is what SAP are struggling with I think.
Not sure I agree on that…but hey.
Lumira is being canned because theyre focussing 100% development time into SAP Analytics Cloud, that's what Ive been told directly by old friends in product management anyway. Roambi is being sucked into SAP Analytics Cloud now too!
ABILtd (BOB member since 2006-02-08)
Point again being Business Objects Bread and Butter was with Deski. It gave unreal power to the user and closest form of an OLAP tool at the time blowing out MSTR and CRYSTAL. Both of these in the hands of a user is nothing short of being a NIGHTMARE!
BOBJ should have been left alone when SAP purchased it. The individual company would have accomplished lots more and probably would have blown Tableau, Power BI, out of the water with inovations. Sorry, the support and people behind the original BOBJ was the BEST but…
di652 (BOB member since 2005-02-24)
Summers were nicer…policemen were taller, too. 
tendernips (BOB member since 2017-07-27)
No argument from me on any of that, completely agree with it all.
Shortly after SAP bought BO it seemed EVERYTHING went to crap! They’re QA of patches & version upgrades became none existent, Customer Service went in the toilet, Webi became a nightmare AND they were trying to yank the plug on Deski at the same time! Wish SAP would have bypassed that buyout…
Captspeed 
(BOB member since 2006-10-03)
just looking up an old thread…
sadly nothing has changed. BO slides further into irrelevance and the fog of complicated usage. We have made the call to move to Power BI, which shocks me but I have to admit BO has been ruined beyond repair and users just find it too clunky, complicated and slow to enage with
yeah … we are still with Deski on XI 3.1.7.4… and just need of upgrade to Oracle 19c should push us forward/elsewhere…
I remember when I first saw the handwriting on the wall. It was the help web page. In the original page you could bookmark a page and return to it at any time or share the link with a co-worker.
Once SAP took over they went the route of the “single page application” philosophy. After that you had to have an incantation to find a particular help page. Something like: “From the main page, click the X link. Then choose the third link under the Y heading.”
As a sometimes web page developer I know that maintaining a single page app is easier - you just have the page maintainer put new content into the CMS and you’re done. No new pages. Management loves the single page app because the look and feel is preserved everywhere.
But as an often web user I loathe that design philosophy because it is inverted, it is company first, user last.
So when that approach works it’s way through an entire catalog of software it is no surprise to see people jumping ship.