On April 24, 1990, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Hubble Space Telescope into space. Around the same time, a small French company named Business Objects was also launched. Hubble revolutionized the field of astronomy and has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe. My favorite story about the Hubble Space Telescope is the discovery of the Deep Field. Essentially, Hubble was pointed at a big patch of “nothing”, only to discover “something” where nothing had previously existed.
Technology moves on, and in 2021 NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope. Unlike Hubble, which orbits the Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope orbits the sun from a vantage point far from Earth. It also studies infrared light instead of visible light and has opened up even more of the universe for astronomers to study.
Last month, Snowflake announced the formation of the Open Semantic Interchange, or OSI. Snowflake is not acting alone, but with a collection of partners including Alation, Atlan, BlackRock, Blue Yonder, Cube, dbt Labs, Elementum AI, Hex, Honeydew, Mistral AI, Omni, RelationalAI, Salesforce, Select Star, Sigma, and ThoughtSpot.
The OSI initiative is a collaborative, open-source effort dedicated to standardizing and streamlining semantic model exchange and utilization across the diverse array of tools and platforms within the data analytics, AI, and BI ecosystem. Our shared vision is to establish a common, vendor-agnostic semantic model specification and query API, promoting unparalleled interoperability, efficiency, and collaboration among all participants. By providing a single, consistent source of truth, this vendor-agnostic standard ensures that your data’s definitions and value remain consistent as they are interchanged between AI agents, BI platforms, and all other tools in your ecosystem, eliminating inconsistencies across your different tools.
From Snowflake’s OSI press release (23 September 2025) (emphasis mine)
As impressive as the list of vendors is, one vendor is missing from the list— SAP.
The SAP BusinessObjects universe is one of the best semantic layers in the industry, if not THE best. One could argue that the universe is the most important element of the SAP BusinessObjects platform- more important than the ubiquitousness of Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence. If you’re unsure on this point, just listen to all of the whining that goes on when organizations migrate away from SAP BusinessObjects to adopt Microsoft’s Power BI.
SAP has much to offer- perhaps even open source- to the Open Semantic Interchange. And SAP’s customers that depend on both the BusinessObjects platform and its universe semantic layer deserve to benefit from future innovations yet to be imagined by the Open Semantic Interchange and its members.
As the James Webb Space telescope elevated the vantage point of astronomers from an Earth-bound orbit to a Sun-bound orbit, SAP can seize the opportunity to raise the universe from a BusinessObjects-bound orbit to an industry-standard orbit.
As Captain Picard might say— “make it so”.
Does the BusinessObjects universe deserve a future with the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI)? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
