Introduction
SAP Dashboards helped launch and fuel the growth of Centigon Solutions, now CMaps Analytics.  SAP Dashboards / Xcelsius is still an amazing product. The draw is using Excel as a common business logic layer for designing apps.
Is Xcelsius Dead?
Xcelsius 2008 is officially dead along with the Adobe Flex 2 software it was built on. End of support last year.
SAP Dashboards however, is NOT dead, and still in used among customers who also own the latest and greatest tools SAP offers.
Vendors like InfoSol and APOS have picked up SAP’s slack by continuing to innovating new tools like dCode that make transitioning from Flash to HTML5 simple. Additionally, CMaps Analytics tools are designed to work with these migration solutions.
SAP Dashboards Best Days are Behind Us
- The community and ecosystem that fueled innovation has slowed down.
- Web standards are fully transitioned from Flash to HTML5 and legacy the beginning of the end of IE8-IE10 is upon us
- No innovation or additional investments for innovation are in the works for SAP Dashboards.
- SAP’s marketing /sales engine is focused on new tools like Lumira and Cloud for Analytics.
What are your options?
Because SAP’s 4 year “convergence” strategy for Dashboards had no formal migration path for technology, skills, design patterns, or components. As a company we opted to take an agnostic view of the future for enterprise dashboards.
Customers who invested in SAP Dashboards will need to re-tool their BI competency centers for dashboards. There are multiple potential paths that we have witnessed among our customers. We have ranked your options based on existing people, processes and technology you have in place.
1. Continue to use SAP Dashboards and look at extensions to get you to HTML5 like dCode
2. Move to SAP BusinessObjects integrated solutions like Antivia DecisionPoint Enterprise or DecisionPoint for Excel
3. Move to SAP Design Studio if you have accounted for new skills, consultants, and/or 3rd party solutions required to deliver
4. Revert back to Microsoft tools with new PowerPivot- A viable alternative for Excel but lacks SAP and SAP BusinessObjects.Â
5. Use Tableau for basic  Excel based visualizations
WHY SUGGEST 3rd PARTY SOFTWARE OVER AN SAP RECOMMENDED SOLUTION?
Our team at CMaps Analytics is not compensated for recommending the solutions listed above (3rd party of SAP). Our goal is to recommend all of the paths that we have witnessed SAP Dashboards customers gravitate toward based on individual needs and experiences.
WHY IS CLOUD NOT LISTED?
There are a handful of good cloud BI solutions available, but we are not recommending moving to the latest Cloud for Analytics or any other third-party cloud dashboard solution because we have not seen any of our SAP Dashboards customers move in that direction. We will continue to monitor these new developments as they become generally available.