SAP customers grappling with fragmented data from multiple sources—which can make it challenging to gain comprehensive insights and drive modern-day decision-making—will be interested in learning more about the February 2025 launch of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC).
The complexity and cost of managing enterprise data lakes has required specialized teams, complex tools, and extensive extract-transformation-load (ETL) code, which is inefficient, error-prone, and costly. Coupled with inconsistent data and the absence of a unified data foundation, ASUG members are finding it challenging to properly leverage AI to deliver smarter and more consistent recommendations that accelerate decision-making and improve business processes.
During mid-February's SAP Business Unleashed event, SAP CEO Christian Klein described how SAP BDC provides organizations with tools and platforms to unify data from SAP and third-party sources across organizations. The goal: to create a reliable data foundation that enables deeper business insights and actions from increasingly complex AI applications.
As part of this launch, SAP announced a strategic partnership with Databricks, combining data within SAP applications with Databricks' data-platform expertise. This offering represents a significant improvement for customers forming dedicated teams—and building separate data lakes—to analyze and report on a mix of SAP and non-SAP data.
A Break with the Past
Until now, the extreme complexity associated with moving non-SAP data into SAP environments has prompted most customers to handle this category of “hybrid” analytics outside of SAP. The challenge created by this situation is that extracting data from SAP to external data lakes is time-consuming, expensive, and typically requires ETL tools to integrate data from various sources.
Even when specialized skills are in place to work with sophisticated ETL tools, organizations often face data quality, scalability, performance, security, and ongoing maintenance issues. This comes at a cost to efficiency and effective decision-making.
SAP BDC reduces—and can even remove—the burden of ETL responsibilities by integrating this critical functionality into the SAP environment. This is especially relevant for business leaders who want to maximize the value of their existing SAP data while adopting generative AI. With SAP BDC serving as a central and streamlined data foundation, SAP's generative-AI copilot Joule can access more datasets, deliver deeper insights, and make smarter recommendations.
On the same day that SAP BDC was introduced, SAP announced ready-to-use Joule agents across finance, service, and sales functions and provided a preview of custom agent builder capabilities for Joule studio in SAP Build that will make it easier for users to build custom AI agents. As SAP users seek to harness generative-AI capabilities within a business context, SAP BDC harmonizes the data those AI applications will depend upon, enabling Joule agents to put insights into action.
SAP BDC is the latest step in advancing SAP's vision of establishing a unified business data fabric that processes data from SAP applications and third-party systems, in structured and unstructured formats, in a standardized way. It joins a growing data-management solutions portfolio, which includes SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Business Warehouse, and SAP BW/4HANA.
Together, SAP’s suite of solutions for data management and analytics equips customers with extended analytics and planning capabilities across multiple lines of business. SAP BDC, specifically, will deliver these capabilities through a catalog of both packaged "data products" derived from SAP solutions and "insight applications" that harness that data through AI models connected to real-time external data sources. The end result: a common semantical data layer that harmonizes data from mission-critical applications, breaks down business silos, and promises to revolutionize decision-making at the intelligent enterprise.
For more information:
- Experience SAP Business Data Cloud with the guided product tour
- Register for the upcoming webinar: “30-Minute Primer on SAP Business Data Cloud”