How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lumira

Lumira, a Short History

In March 1966, Twentieth Century Fox released The Sound of Music, a film adaptation of a popular Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The film became the highest grossing film of 1965 and in 1966 became the highest grossing film in history. This year, we celebrate the film’s 60th anniversary with special edition Blu Ray box sets and streaming on Disney+. The film follows Maria, a nun who is sent to be the governess of seven children belonging to the grumpy widower Captain von Trapp. Maria’s fellow nuns share some of their frustrations in one of the film’s musical numbers, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria”.

How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertigibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!

2026 will also mark another anniversary – 14 years since SAP launched SAP Visual Intelligence, which we now know as SAP Lumira. In 2012, on-premise SAP HANA was the rage at that year’s SAPPHIRE conference. SAP Lumira was a brand-new desktop product envisioned to go head-to-head with its arch nemesis, Tableau Desktop. SAP Lumira content could be published to either the cloud or the BusinessObjects BI 4.1 platform we were all using at that time. In the future, SAP would marry two previously incompatible products- SAP Lumira and SAP Design Studio- which became SAP Lumira Discovery 2.x and SAP Lumira Designer 2.x. It was a brilliant strategy.

Then the cloud happened. In 2015, SAP released SAP Cloud for Analytics, which we know today as SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). SAP promised to support Lumira with bug fixes and platform support. But new features or enhancements for Lumira would cease- those would be reserved for SAC.

Lumira in 2026

Unlike the problem of Maria, which was solved 60 years ago before the film’s end credits, some SAP customers have been wrestling with “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lumira” for nearly 16 years.

Both Lumira Discovery and Lumira Designer continue to be supported on SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.3. Lumira 2.4, the latest version, was released in August 2020. With the arrival of SAP BI 2025, SAP indicated that Lumira Discovery was deprecated and would not be present in BI 2025. But support for Lumira Designer in BI 2025 (and beyond) would continue.

SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 was released last year on March 20, 2025. While promised, there was no compatible version of Lumira. Last month, SAP released SAP BI 2025 SP0 Patch 8, which is the first patch level SAP describes as compatible with the forthcoming SAP Lumira Designer 2025, delayed but expected in “Q1-2026”. Or in other words, just a few weeks or months from now. SAP Lumira Designer 2025 is the product’s official name according to the SAP Product Availability Matrix (along with SAP Lumira Designer 2027, which is planned).

Recommendation

InfoSol recommends that customers continuing to rely on Lumira should proceed with their SAP BusinessObjects BI 2025 upgrade plans by setting up a sandbox and proceeding with their usual upgrade testing. Lumira Designer 2025 can be added to the upgrade environment once it arrives- sometime in the next few weeks or months.

Since SAP is only providing patch and platform support, we advise that our customers using Lumira plan for the future. The analytics world has changed dramatically in the 14 years since Lumira was first introduced. Many organizations continue to rely on the SAP BusinessObjects platform in tandem with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, or sometimes both. That is why InfoBurst brings new capabilities to all three of these analytics platforms.

InfoSol can work with you to understand both your current Lumira requirements and future analytics goals. We can help create an unbiased and tailored path forward- leveraging your existing analytics portfolio and extending it, when needed, with modern AI and delivery capabilities. Contact InfoSol today for a free SAP Lumira consultation.

References

SAP KB 3017689 – SAP Lumira and SAP Business Intelligence Platform BI Platform

SAP KB 3582179 – Lumira Discovery is removed from BI 2025

SAP KB 3560025 – Which products and features are deprecated or removed in SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 2025