After being away from BOB for quite a while, I wonder what the current status in regards to Data Services is at customers.
Are you using the tool, satisfied with it, issues unresolved still,…? Mind to share a few words?
Werner Daehn 
(BOB member since 2004-12-17)
Hi Werner.
I’m currently using Data Services to migrate data from legacy systems into a new implementation of S4/HANA. The customer is using DS as this is the SAP recommended tool. LSMW is also being used for post migration data updates.
My previous project was using Data Services to load transactional data into a Data Warehouse. Unfortunately, this customer is looking to move away from DS as they were pissed off by SAP who accused them of being in breach of their license agreement and threatened court action!
Nemesis 
(BOB member since 2004-06-09)
We still use it as our main Data Warehouse tool and are currently at version 14.2.6.1113 SP6 in all environments.
It took almost a year to get all of our environments properly configured with memory and disks after upgrading from 14.0 to our 14.2 version as we saw numerous performance issues and failures early on.
The developer GUI is way out of date and is severely lacking in features. It has not changed much since we moved from 11.7 (?) to 14.0 several years ago. We see frequent app crashes and hanging still in the app with the corresponding 1gb DMP files.
Our local repository which houses all of our production ETL jobs and development environment is now over 70mb in size which has over time slowed down GUI performance more and more.
We plan to upgrade sometime in 2020 to a close to recent/stable release as we have huge project commitments currently that prevent us taking on another unknown with an upgrade this year.
I could go on and on about our experience with the Sales folks and licensing issues, but I’ll not vent in this forum on that issue. 
Craig Schnur 
(BOB member since 2009-10-09)
Biggest problem with BODS is lack of future roadmap for the tool @ SAP. If you don’t have an roadmap for the tool then you don’t have an future for it, so customers are leaving the platform due to this strategic reason in my opinion.
If SAP don’t have plans for BODS in the future then they could also just make BODS opensource and build a community around the tool like talent did and just maybe the future for BODS will look a little bit more bright. SAP could still charge money for the tool under an opensource license, but with the benefit of getting development contribution outside of SAP. Microsoft is getting a lot of benefit from opensource contribution right now powershell in Azure is opensource just to name a few.
retro (BOB member since 2014-02-28)
We’re using DS 4.2 sp 11. We rely on it for enterprise integrations (prem to prem, and some cloud to prem) and to facilitate the etl work associated with developing and maintaining our bi data marts business specific as well as master data. We have come to rely heavily on this tool for the movement and transformation of data in our organization, however I have to reiterate the concern mentioned by retro about lack for future direction with DS. We are currently migrating to S4 HANA and SAC is being marketed heavily along with SDI. These are great for cloud to cloud scenarios but the SAP team we deal with still admit data services is the tool for prem to prem etl. I’m concerned with the future longevity of DS support and how there is virtually no mention of it in SAP future plans. In light of this I’ve begrudgingly had to start look at products like KNIME.
seanrec 
(BOB member since 2015-02-19)
Many of our customers are still using Data Services 4.2 - from SP10 to SP14.
(Yes the folks on SP10 know they have to roll out SP14!)
It’s still heavily used for all our SAP S/4HANA data migration projects. We have customers who use SAP Data Services along with BW/4HANA and BW on HANA to bring non-SAP data into BW.
And we have customers who use SAP Data Services to drive their Enterprise Data Warehouses. Some of these have SAP S/4HANA or ECC 6.0 and prefer not to use BW, others have no SAP business suite systems at all. Most of these customers also use SAP BusinessObjects for reporting.
ErikR 
(BOB member since 2007-01-10)
Can you advise any tools for self-service data analytics and visualization tools?
What is the link with Data Services ? The topic is about this product.