SAP held off the general release for legitimate and important reasons, according to Lucas: "We set some pretty stringent go-live criteria for ourselves. If we didn't get to those, we weren't going to go live."

Only a handful of customers participating in the 4.0 ramp-up program--SAP's name for when products are out of beta but not yet in mainstream release--were still experiencing some issues by the end, he adds.

"Some of it was implementation, some of it was customers requesting features that weren't really bug [fixes]," Lucas says.

Arch Coal is currently running version 3.1 of the Business Objects BI suite with solid success, says Jamie Oswald, a senior BI analyst there.