SAP Business Data Cloud: The Intelligent Data Foundation for AI-Driven Business Success

Businesses increasingly rely on real-time data to drive decisions, optimize operations, and unlock AI-powered insights. Yet, many organizations still grapple with data strategy, transfer delays, and analytical challenges that slow down their digital ambitions. On February 13th, 2025, SAP announced its new managed software-as-a-service, SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). As of Q1 2025, BDC is in a controlled general availability phase, initially available to selected customers. This unified data management solution addresses key pain points and combines existing and new services from SAP and its partners. BDC acts as a context-aware data foundation for analytical and AI use cases, utilizing a cost-effective SAP-managed object store for data storage.

BDC is an evolution of the business data fabric journey, with Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud as core components. The solution integrates various technologies to deliver curated data products, advanced analytics, benchmarking data, and AI-powered insights, utilizing applications like SAP Datasphere, SAP Business Warehouse, and SAP Analytics Cloud.

Understanding SAP Business Data Cloud

SAP Business Data Cloud is a fully managed SaaS solution purpose-built to unify and govern SAP data while seamlessly integrating third-party sources. It combines the powerful capabilities of SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Datasphere, and SAP Analytics Cloud into one cohesive platform. The result? Businesses gain access to real-time, trustworthy data and a scalable, AI-ready environment to support intelligent decision-making. These features lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and data integration costs, achieve quicker time to value, and drive business transformation with AI and analytics.

What's New with SAP Business Data Cloud?

SAP is revitalizing its Data and Analytics (D&A) platform with BDC, which features enhanced functionality, openness, and adherence to industry standards compared to SAP BW. Unlike before, when transferring SAP data to an external data lakehouse meant losing semantics and business context, SAP BDC preserves these elements. This ensures that curated, consumable data sets can be effectively utilized in analytics, AI, and custom applications.

Companies that can effectively consolidate, analyze, and operationalize their data unlock powerful insights, much like striking gold. The deeper and more connected the analysis, the greater the business value. SAP Business Data Cloud is designed to break down these long-standing silos. It allows businesses to seamlessly connect data across SAP applications, third-party platforms, and multiple business domains. This unified approach ensures your decision-makers have access to the latest, most relevant data, whenever and wherever it’s needed.

SAP BDC integration with Databricks

A standout capability of BDC is its integration with Databricks, the market leader in data engineering and AI-powered analytics. This partnership enables organizations to combine structured and unstructured data, delivering domain-specific insights while reducing redundancy. Thanks to zero-copy data access, businesses no longer need to replicate massive datasets across multiple environments — a game-changer for enterprises managing petabytes of data.

Previously, consolidating bulk and IoT data with SAP data cost-effectively was challenging, leading companies to extract SAP data to external data lakehouses. In contrast, SAP BDC provides bidirectional integration with Databricks, allowing data to stay within the SAP environment. This enables efficient management of large datasets from various sources, creating optimal conditions for AI and ML applications.

Creating a Unified Place for SAP and Non-SAP Data

Modern businesses depend on vast and growing volumes of data from both SAP and non-SAP sources to power value-driven use cases and data modelling in SAP. Yet, inconsistent semantic models often create obstacles to innovation, complicating data integration efforts and delaying the realization of business value. SAP BDC addresses this challenge by allowing organizations to seamlessly leverage SAP and non-SAP data within a unified, standardized semantic framework.

Delivering Insights and Real-Time Analytics with SAP BDC

Traditionally, businesses have faced significant complexity in harnessing the full potential of data-intensive applications built on SAP data. SAP BDC simplifies this process by providing real-time analytics, insights, and intelligent recommendations. In addition, it empowers companies to access benchmarking capabilities and industry-specific knowledge derived from aggregated, cross-customer SAP data.

How BDC Works: Two Key Scenarios

To make the concept more relatable, we're breaking it down into two practical scenarios:

Scenario 1: “Out-of-the-Box” SAP Insights Apps with S/4HANA & SAP SuccessFactors

In this setup, you can connect your S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors systems directly to BDC using pre-built connectors and SAP Insights Apps. Here’s how the process unfolds:

• Data is securely extracted in real-time from SAP source systems like S/4HANA and SuccessFactors.
• Through SAP Datasphere, this data is harmonized, enriched, and governed.
• It then flows into SAP Analytics Cloud, where it powers dynamic dashboards, AI-powered analytics, and embedded insights within your business applications.
• It results in consistent, real-time reporting and predictive insights without cumbersome data transfers or manual interventions.

This scenario is for businesses looking to simplify reporting, improve decision-making speed, and create AI-ready datasets without the complexity traditionally associated with data warehousing.

Scenario 2: BDC Integration with SAP BW/4HANA Private Edition, SAP Apps, and Third-Party Applications

The true power of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) lies in its flexibility. This scenario highlights BDC as a central hub that consolidates data from diverse environments, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or a hybrid setup, making it easily accessible for analytics, reporting, and AI applications. Using a data provisioning tool, you can integrate your SAP BW/4HANA objects into SAP Business Data Cloud, allowing you to onboard SAP BW objects into SAP Datasphere and combine them with your existing data model.

Why are We Excited About BDC

For those of us who’ve battled the daily frustration of outdated data, failed transfers, and a lack of ownership over data pipelines, BDC is more than just another tool. Having worked closely with SAP environments for years, we have experienced firsthand the daily challenges of transferring data from SAP systems to external data repositories, such as dealing with outdated snapshots, transfer errors, and the frustrating lack of end-to-end ownership when issues arise.

SAP BDC Accelerates the Path from Data to Decisions

Inefficiencies in data management frequently lead to business decisions being based on outdated or incomplete information, hindering the effective use of AI-driven insights. However, implementing BDC transforms this scenario by providing real-time access to reliable data, all while ensuring governance and trustworthiness across the entire data landscape.

Interested in seeing SAP Business Data Cloud in action? Rialtes is dedicated to helping businesses leverage their data for AI-driven decision-making, streamlined operations, and innovation. Contact us to explore its potential impact on your organization.