For decades, data has been the backbone of innovation. And in today’s AI-enabled economy, its role has never been more vital. Now, data must be delivered in a way that both people and AI agents can understand and act on with confidence.
At SAP, we believe in creating an ecosystem that simplifies your data landscape and preserves the mission-critical business context of all of your data. This is made possible with a business data fabric.
This architectural approach marks the culmination of decades of progress — from cubes to warehouses to lakehouses — now converging toward a business data fabric architecture that brings the true meaning of data together for AI projects to succeed at scale.
Simplify your data landscape with a business data fabric
Earlier this year, we announced SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC), making end-to-end business data fabric capabilities available for everyone that relies on mission-critical SAP data, including fully managed SAP Databricks.
This week at SAP TechEd Berlin, we announced the SAP Snowflake solution extension for SAP BDC that brings Snowflake’s data and AI capabilities directly to SAP customers.
Together with SAP BDC, this provides organizations with the flexibility to choose the right compute and storage for every data and AI workload — extending their business data fabric while maintaining governance, interoperability, and semantics. As a solution extension, SAP Snowflake will be available directly through SAP, providing a simplified operational experience for customers.
For many customers, integrating data across multi-cloud and hybrid environments adds complexity, especially when bringing transactional and analytical workloads together. Too often, that process comes with a hidden data tax: it strips away the business context and semantics that give data its meaning.
We recently announced SAP BDC Connect, a capability that gives customers bi-directional, zero copy data and metadata sharing in SAP Business Data Cloud with their existing Databricks and Google Cloud environments. Today, we are excited to announce SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, making it dramatically easier for customers to harmonize and govern mission-critical data wherever it resides.
Connect all your data
As organizations simplify their data landscapes, building a trusted data foundation rooted in business context has become a top priority. A global survey of 1,200 business and technology leaders found that nearly half are heavily investing more in harmonizing business data, underscoring the growing importance of using data built on industry standards.
To help accelerate this progress, SAP delivers fully managed data products as a core component of SAP Business Data Cloud, now with new innovations that expand coverage and connectivity:
- Data product studio: A new capability in SAP BDC allows users to create, model, and manage reusable data products using both visual tools and SQL-based transformations from a single workspace. Users can define schema, lineage, and logic to blend SAP and non-SAP data into governed assets with full version control and lifecycle management. It is a simpler way to cross-pollinate data products across lines of business and ensure a consistent definition of data across your business data fabric.
- Additional SAP data products: New data products are now available through SAP BDC, spanning SAP Cloud ERP, SAP SuccessFactors, sustainability, and customer experience solutions and more — bringing even broader coverage across business domains.
- Bi-directional data sharing: We announced data sharing between SAP BDC and SAP HANA Cloud, unlocking the value of data across both transactional and analytical workloads. Customers can reuse existing objects, such as SAP HANA calculation views, directly in SAP BDC — preserving business logic, KPIs, and governance as they extend models across their business data fabric.
Amplify your agents and applications with an AI database
We’re expanding SAP HANA Cloud with new capabilities that make it the AI database for building agents and intelligent applications, helping developers connect and understand all types of data: structured, spatial, graph, vector embeddings, and more, all within a single in-memory engine.
Today, we’re expanding these multi-model capabilities with three major innovations that make it easier to build agentic AI experiences.
- Expanded knowledge graph capabilities to enable accurate agents: SAP HANA Cloud knowledge graph engine will now enable customers to automatically generate knowledge graphs from SAP HANA Cloud metadata. The automated graph will include tables and columns and can demonstrate data relationships. These knowledge graphs are customizable and composable, so developers can review data mapping, modify the graph structure, execute a semantic search, and use it to ground agents with the business context it needs to reason accurately.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for SAP HANA Cloud: We’re expanding SAP HANA Cloud with Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, giving Joule Agents access to rich multi-model engines in SAP HANA Cloud. While SQL remains the default database standard, MCP allows Joule Agents to go beyond rows and columns to interface with unstructured data — understanding relationships, locations, and meaning across all data types. In practice, that means Joule Agents can navigate relationships between customers and suppliers, analyze geographic dependencies through spatial data, and perform semantic searches through vector embeddings.
- Tabular AI capabilities: This integration with SAP AI Core allows users to run AI workloads such as forecasting, anomaly detection, and predictive modeling directly on structured business data from SAP HANA Cloud. Along with ready-to-use tabular AI models, customers also gain access to the SAP-RPT-1 AI model, a new transformer-based foundation model. Embedded natively in SAP HANA Cloud, this delivers predictions without task-specific pre-training, enabling developers to use simple SQL procedures to bring AI closer to their SAP data and generate semantically rich outputs.
Get started today
A business data fabric provides a deeply integrated ecosystem for all your data. And with SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud, you have a fully managed solution for every data and AI workload that ensures business context remains intact across your data landscape.
- Experience SAP BDC with the free “Getting Started” series
- Sign up for early access to public preview features and product road map
- Learn more about SAP Business Data Cloud
Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer of SAP Data and Analytics.
