In recent years SAP has released exiting new technologies for a wide variety of business scenarios. There is the much talked about In-Memory technology (SAP HANA) which enables real time SAP BI reporting. There is a complete set of products for data quality management and master data management. SAP has unlocked a great potential by enabling the use of social media comments in SAP BI reporting. What all these products have in common is that to a certain extend they are build on, or rely on, the application SAP BusinessObjects Data Services. Surprisingly enough, there seems to be quite a slow uptake on this product amongst organisations running SAP.
I understand not everyone gets excited about a piece of 'middleware' - an application which is not visible to end users. At the same time, I would expect people who are interested in infrastructure and system architecture to be interested Data Services. There are two good reasons why Data Services is relevant:
Data Services is an easy to use ETL tool, and can probably replace one or several tools in use in your SAP landscape. It is now part of SAP's best practise architecture for Data Warehousing.
Data Services is a prerequisite for several new SAP technologies - and my expectation is that this will be more and more so.
My recommendation would be to get the infrastructure in order while you can. Implement Data Services in your current landscape so you are prepared when projects require it. In the meanwhile you might save a few bob as you might be able to phase out existing ETL tools. Data Services is the new standard and it is here to stay.