SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC): Central hub for business data

On February 13, 2025, SAP officially presented a decisive further development of its data strategy: SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). With the help of SAP BDC, companies are able to create added value from SAP and non-SAP data in real time. The solution combines new and existing technologies to provide users with curated data products, advanced cross-functional analytics, benchmarking data and AI-powered insights applications. Although different applications such as SAP Datasphere, SAP Business Warehouse and SAP Analytics Cloud are involved, SAP BDC offers a unified user experience based on SAP Business Data Cloud to make intelligent decisions faster and optimize business outcomes.

Would you like to learn more about the architecture and functionalities of SAP BDC?

Companies solve their data challenges with SAP BDC

Today’s business users need real-time insights into their available data while maintaining business context. This requires a holistic integration between data platforms and business applications with data products based on a harmonized data model. Linking insights and business decisions is becoming a decisive success factor in the age of AI.

SAP Business Data Cloud provides various functionalities that enable companies to solve their common challenges in dealing with data – data provision, data distribution in heterogeneous systems, SaaS as a platform, etc. These features help to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and data integration costs, achieve faster time to value and transform businesses based on artificial intelligence and analytics.

• Immediately usable business data with intact semantics
  Previously, when SAP data was transferred to an external data lakehouse, the semantics and business context were lost. As a result, companies had to spend a lot of time and money restoring the semantics. With SAP BDC, the business semantics of SAP data are preserved. As curated, easily consumable data sets, data products can be used in analytics, AI and custom applications.

• Bidirectional integration with Databricks

  In the past, there was no cost-effective approach to consolidate bulk data, IoT data, etc. with SAP data. This forced companies to extract their SAP data to an external data lakehouse. SAP BDC, in contrast, offers bidirectional integration with Databricks so that the data remains in the SAP environment. This makes it possible to organize and manage large amounts of data from different endpoints – and create ideal conditions for applications based on artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML).

• Creating a unified environment for SAP and non-SAP data

  Companies rely on ever-increasing amounts of data from SAP and non-SAP sources to realize value-adding use cases. However, inconsistent semantic models stand in the way of innovation and increase the effort required for data integration and the time to value creation. This is where SAP BDC has a positive impact by enabling companies to directly use SAP and non-SAP data based on common semantics.

• Provision of analytics, insights, intelligent functions and recommendations

  Until now, companies have had to make considerable efforts to exploit the full potential of data-intensive applications based on SAP data. SAP BDC, however, not only makes analytics, insights and recommendations available out-of-the-box, but also gives companies the opportunity to use benchmarking and industry knowledge from cross-customer SAP data.

This is how SAP envisions the interaction of applications, data and artificial intelligence in the future (source: SAP).

Databricks as part of SAP BDC architecture

As part of SAP BDC, companies can opt for a Databricks instance as an inbound OEM. Databricks is a cloud-based platform that meets the requirements of modern data management. It provides the best possible support for the creation, scaling and management of data and AI models. The close partnership between SAP and Databricks enables companies to leverage Databricks’ extensive tools for data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning with the diverse, semantically rich, pre-built data products from various SAP applications as well as non-SAP data. This results in faster value creation.

Conclusion: Faster from data to decisions thanks to SAP BDC

SAP Business Data Cloud brings together business data from all areas of a company to create a semantically rich treasure of data. This makes SAP BDC the central hub for all business-critical data and serves as an important cornerstone for SAP Business AI. Artificial intelligence, data and applications are combined in an innovative way so that companies can derive the greatest possible added value from their data. In short: SAP BDC accelerates the path from data to decisions.