When to Jump into BI 2025 and Avoid the Jellyfish

So a couple of months ago, I find myself standing waist-deep in the Mediterranean sea on the Costa Brava in Spain. The water is a little cold and I am hesitant to dive in. It’s not just because of the shock of the cold water, it’s also because I have already spotted 2 jellyfish and I don’t particularly want to get entangled with them.

There are other people swimming and playing but I see them watching out for jellyfish too. I finally find a spot that looks good and take the plunge. After the initial shock it feels good but I quickly come back to the surface again to keep an eye out for jellyfish.

My experience reminded me of some recent conversations I had with BusinessObjects customers about upgrading to the new BI 2025 release. They are hesitant to take the plunge, and when they do, they will be watching out for problems that might sting them – just like jellyfish!

The current release of BusinessObjects, BI 2025, was released in March this year but few organizations have upgraded to it so far. This is partly because they are hesitant as it is a new software release and partly because they may have had issues stabilizing the last BI 4.3 release.

BI 2025 introduces a range of powerful new features and functions with a whole new library of UI5 components that can not only improve your Webi visualizations but also allow you to create offline interactive reports and dashboards that can be distributed with a dataset and used without being connected to BusinessObjects. This would be very useful for sending interactive reports to vendors, suppliers and others outside your organization that you do not want to connect to your system. Another great benefit of this is that there is no software which needs to be installed by the recipient and the license required to use these offline reports/dashboards is free!

There are a lot of other new very cool features in BI 2025 like Enhanced Tool Tips where you can decide what is viewed in the tool tip when you hover over a component in a chart, point in a graph or cell in a table. It can be a drill down to the next level of detail or a report (scrollable if you like since Webi has scrollable tables now as well). And, you can have a tool tip, within a tool tip, within a tool tip ad infinitum!

There is a lot more and you can see many of the BI 2025 features in a live webinar on SpeakBO

However, most BusinessObjects customers put stability over new features mainly because they run business mission-critical reports with it and cannot afford to deal with issues or potential downtime.

SAP is making a concerted effort to address new software stability with the new cadence of releases starting with BI 2025 with no more Service Packs and just Fix Packs every 6 to 8 weeks. However there will be some minor new functionality added to a couple of the Fix Packs (potential jellyfish!).

BI 4.3 is fully supported until Dec. 31, 2026 and then for another year without fix packs until Dec. 31, 2027. Most customers will probably wait till mid-2026 before upgrading to BI 2025 hoping that others will try it out first and uncover any issues. However, some will try sooner because they have a use case for some of the new BI 2025 functionality.

My advice is to install BI 2025 on a sandbox server and both try out the new functionality and start testing with some of your reports. Once you feel confident, then look to upgrade.

At IBIS 2026, the 3-day BusinessObjects Conference in AZ, June 22-24, there will be a lot of great sessions on both BI 4.3 and BI 2025 and case studies of customers upgrading to BI 2025. This will be the perfect venue to hear, share, and learn about the “jellyfish” and decide when you will upgrade to BI 2025.