Although some customers will be dismayed to learn that the products they are using will be phased out, one analyst commended SAP for taking decisive action and said more is likely to follow.

"I'm very impressed they are making very hard choices and decisions," said Boris Evelson, principal analyst for BI at Forrester Research. "Unlike some competitors who are leaving all the products they acquire on the table and saying, 'We'll never sunset anything,' Business Objects and SAP are making those hard choices."

SAP will probably be making other difficult choices as well, Evelson said. It still has to deal with overlap between Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Dashboard Builder, Voyager and other products on the Business Objects side, and Visual Analyzer and BEx BI from SAP. Analysts expect mostly Business Objects products to take precedence.

Describing the decision process, Schwarz said: "Ultimately we looked at which has the largest installed base, which has the best customer experience, which is the fastest-moving in the marketplace, and which has the best architecture that you can integrate other pieces into, and those were the decisions that were taken."

SAP is trying to minimize the disruption for customers, Schwarz said. For example, it will import the data models from SRC to OutlookSoft, as well as "industry-specific solutions built around medical, banking, retail and so forth, so that will not be lost," he said.