SAP Business Warehouse (BW) 7.x covers the classic on-premise data-warehouse releases (through 7.4) that many organisations used for enterprise reporting and analytics on the traditional, non-HANA-optimised BW model.
It first shipped around 2005. SAP mainstream maintenance ended 31 December 2020 — the point after which SAP stops delivering new patches, legal and regulatory updates, and support packages for the release. Crucially, SAP offers no extended-maintenance phase for this release, so the mainstream date is a hard cut-off rather than the start of a paid extension — there is no buying of extra time at the version level. Systems still on this release are now running without standard SAP support, which is a security, compliance and audit exposure that should be closed quickly.
The forward options are SAP BW 7.5 (still supported), SAP BW/4HANA (the HANA-optimised successor) or SAP Datasphere in the cloud. Most customers either consolidate on 7.5 or take a conversion to BW/4HANA.
BI and data teams running older BW 7.x releases should plan their target now; these releases are past mainstream maintenance, so reporting continuity depends on moving to a supported BW generation.
Independent reference tool. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by SAP SE. Product names are referenced as plain text for identification only. Always confirm dates against SAP's official Product Availability Matrix and your support contract.