Future of BCS?

Thanks to those on this thread that gave me comments or questions relevant to my session at SPTechCon.  I posted my slides here https://www.slideshare.net/JeffFried/is-bcs-dead in case they are useful to you.

To the “is BCS dead” question my basic conclusion is “it’s a zombie”.   It’s not deprecated (yet) and fine to use but there is no attention from Microsoft, no owner, and there are alternatives on the horizon.    There are forward-going alternatives you can smell for almost everything EXCEPT for search (indexing connectors), which of course is my main focus, so it’s an uncomfortable picture.

I do see PowerApps with the OPDG as the future direction for many use cases (and FLow, PowerBI, and Azure Logic Apps, on the same gateway).   But there is no real equivalent of external columns now, nor of the Business data web parts, and a variety of other things where your choice is BCS, or Hybrid BCS (however clunky it is) or pretty extensive custom code.