The business intelligence (BI) and analytics market is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by rapid advancements in generative AI and the demand for more intuitive, integrated data experiences.

A trusted data foundation is critical in the age of AI. But in a global survey of 1,200 business and technology leaders, 55 percent cited poor data quality as their biggest challenge. And nearly half struggle to harmonize data across multiple ecosystems.

SAP Business Data Cloud offers organizations a fully managed SaaS solution that unifies and governs SAP data while seamlessly connects with third-party data. This data platform gives organizations the tools they need to make even more impactful decisions and insights across all lines of business.

After only eight months in the market, leading analyst firms have given SAP Business Data Cloud high marks for its analytics and BI solutions, primarily SAP Analytics Cloud.

SAP recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment

IDC MarketScape provides in-depth quantitative and qualitative technology market assessments. The evaluation highlights the most influential factors for technology buyers that want to introduce, modernize, or replace business intelligence and analytics tools within their organization.

“Organizations are constantly striving to engage in data-driven decisions,” said Megha Kumar, research vice president, Analytics and AI, IDC. “This need for insights across the board puts pressure on data and analytics teams. This will result in organizations seeking capabilities around automation, GenAI, and agentic AI features within their business intelligence and analytics platform. It is also important that these insights are available in the flow of work to allow for improved collaboration and decision velocity.”

IDC MarketScape recognizes SAP as a Leader for the following strengths:

• Focused on integrating data from SAP and non-SAP sources and enabling customers to engage in analytics, planning, and AI in a single environment
• Solution designed to support both technical and nontechnical users, with self-service analytics, ad hoc data exploration, and embedded analytics experiences within business applications
• Features such as zero-copy data integration and focused on expanding the ecosystem beyond traditional SAP data sources

Read an excerpt from IDC’s report with additional details here.

SAP named a Market Leader in BARC Score Enterprise BI & Analytics Platforms, 2025

The BARC Score report assesses solutions that fulfill a broad set of BI and analytics needs. BARC named SAP a Market Leader, citing the following benefits:

• Integrated business-user-oriented solution for planning and analytics — with embedded functionality for augmented analytics and application design
• Smart features and natural language generation functions help users to dig deep into data sets quickly by surfacing trends and outliers automatically
• Exclusive connectivity, live access, embedded analytics, and prebuilt content available for SAP sources and applications speed up implementation and help to gain insights from these systems
• Capabilities to govern master data and align KPIs across an organization
• Flexible options for product usage with multi-tenant or private tenant options for deployments in the public cloud on AWS, Azure, Alibaba, and GCP

Read BARC’s full report here.

This recognition from both the IDC MarketScape and BARC reinforces the pivotal role of SAP Business Data Cloud in empowering organizations to become truly data-driven.

By providing a unified, intelligent, and scalable platform that fuels business AI, SAP continues to set the standard for modern data and analytics, ensuring customers can derive trusted insights and drive decisive actions in an increasingly complex business landscape.

Dan Yu is chief marketing officer for SAP Business Data Cloud at SAP.

MADRID — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA and HKEX: 9988) to accelerate cloud transformation.

As part of the collaboration, Alibaba Group will leverage SAP Cloud ERP Private for its enterprise infrastructure, as well as a joint go-to-market strategy aimed at delivering accelerated value for customers worldwide.

Alibaba, the Chinese multinational technology company focused on e-commerce and cloud computing, will leverage SAP Business Suite for faster maintenance, smooth upgrades and easier integration of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into core business processes. Alibaba Group also plans to deploy SAP Business AI, SAP Business Technology Platform, and SAP Ariba, SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Concur, and SAP Emarsys solutions to further optimize its technological backbone, enabling greater agility and resilience in serving its vast ecosystem of businesses and consumers.

“Our collaboration with SAP reinforces our commitment to empowering global businesses with world-class technologies,” Alibaba Group Chairman Joe Tsai said. “By combining SAP’s enterprise software with Alibaba Cloud’s robust infrastructure and AI capabilities, we can help customers build smarter, more agile operations.”

The collaboration marks the next chapter in Alibaba’s and SAP’s longstanding partnership focused on enhancing operational efficiency and accelerating innovation for joint customers. A core component of this strategic alliance is a joint go-to-market initiative.

Under the collaboration initially focused on the China market, enterprises will be able to implement SAP Integrated Business Planning and embark on the RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP journeys. It is also planned to be rolled out in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. With Alibaba Group as a certified hyperscaler for SAP software workloads, Chinese enterprises will also be able to deploy SAP Cloud ERP and SAP Cloud ERP Private solutions, empowering them with scalable, more secure and intelligent solutions tailored to local business needs. Marking a significant step in enterprise AI integration, SAP is also exploring the integration of Alibaba’s large language model, Qwen, to the generative AI hub in SAP AI Core in China to enable enterprise users to access localized generative AI capabilities within SAP software applications and Custom AI applications. In parallel, SAP is exploring the deployment of its AI Foundation on Alibaba Cloud to bring powerful, scalable AI tools to customers operating in China. Alibaba also will be part of the latest infrastructure-as-a-service certification program to support customers running SAP’s enterprise solutions.

“Our collaboration with Alibaba Group is a testament to the power and flexibility of SAP’s cloud solutions,” SAP CEO Christian Klein said. “Our joint go-to-market strategy can unlock new opportunities for enterprises by providing them with access to a comprehensive suite of tools and services. Together, we can help our joint customers drive innovation, improve operational performance and create new competitive advantages. We look forward to working with Alibaba to shape the future of cloud-powered digital transformation.”

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Today we can finally see the consumer version of what futurists, writers, and filmmakers have been conceptualizing for long: AI that can predict events and outcomes even before they happen. When Isaac Asimov foresaw cars with “robot brains,” he described a fictional technology that would fuel such an invention. Seven decades later, autonomous cars are a reality because of AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data from sensors, cameras, and other sources. And these proactive, predictive, and preventative capabilities of AI are equally applicable in almost any industry today, for example in healthcare with AI-powered wearables, retail with optimization of inventory for high-volume sales, or manufacturing with maintenance through anomaly detection.

When it comes to customer support, these capabilities are game-changing not only for current applications but also for future implications. The way businesses deliver support is improving every day, thanks to the rapidly evolving framework: technological breakthroughs, business innovations, and process agility. Here are six key methods that can transform the delivery of customer support.

1. Real-time monitoring

With AI-infused features in diagnostics, an electric car can detect potential malfunctions and schedule its own service appointment automatically, preventing issues like battery depletion or tire pressure drops before they become critical.

How does real-time monitoring play out in the world of business software? SAP Cloud ALM provides a feature-rich observability platform that can collect telemetry data, like metrics, logs, and traces, from applications and their supporting infrastructure, allowing support teams to review the health of these systems. By providing real-time analytics and a centralized dashboard, SAP Cloud ALM helps empower IT teams to quickly respond and fix issues, so the business remains operational with minimal interruptions. Additionally, the use of OpenTelemetry standardizes observability within a modern customer landscape.

“The SAP Cloud ALM solution has been instrumental for our IT operations. It offers real-time insights and seamless integration across all our enterprise applications, making everything run more smoothly. It’s like having a bird’s-eye view of our operations, ensuring efficiency and helping us stay proactive rather than reactive.”

Omprakash H, Senior Director, Blueprint Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

2. Proactive resolution

Customer feedback loops play an important role in improving products and services and refining customer relationships. Repeat requests, in customer and user feedback, help service providers identify critical needs and also prioritize features to be delivered.

For example, users within SAP Business Network and SAP Ariba solutions go to the help center for self-service or case assistance 10.8 times less than they did years ago. These drop-in, end-user support sessions are the result of features that have been built into the product, based on customer feedback.

AI-enabled outbreak detection is another significant process in proactive resolution that allows support teams to address unexpected increases in anomalies, customer complaints, or issues.

“We continuously identify the reasons for frequent customer demands and challenges from inquiries raised to SAP support. This allows SAP to proactively deliver the most impactful product changes before they become a challenge for more customers. This way, we improve our products while also focusing on key product capabilities used by our customers today.”

Alexey Ukrainsky, Solution Support Architect, SAP MCC

3. Predictive analytics

In the retail industry, predictive analytics is used effectively for proactive and preventative support. One prominent example is SAP’s holiday season readiness program, which helps position SAP as a front-runner in AI-driven, predictive, and proactive support solutions. With the goal of issue prevention at its core, the program can provide a comprehensive, 360-degree customer support profile, helping to accelerate issue detection and anticipate potential problems with AI-driven features like a virtual support assistant, resource prediction, web traffic prediction, a recommendation engine, case history analysis, issue correlation, and pattern recognition.

“During Cyber Week 2024, SAP’s holiday reason readiness program equipped our support and ops teams to achieve 100% uptime for our customers with the predictive, proactive, and bi-directional support model implemented by the program.”

Tarun Luthra, Head of Support, I&CX Solutions

4. Customer journey mapping

SAP Signavio solutions can help businesses visualize the end-to-end customer journey, tracking interactions across different touchpoints. This enables companies to identify areas of improvement in their customer support processes, leading to more personalized and effective interactions.

With the help of SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, SAP can successfully map support processes to help implement AI improvements for optimizing our services. The result: a 100% increase reported in customer value.

For example, a business that struggles with connecting customer experience data and operational data can take advantage of the SAP Signavio Journey-to-Process Analytics solution to help reduce time to insight and uncover anomalies and trends.

“The challenge in increasing our customer experience lies in the direct link between process and journey activities. I see SAP Signavio solutions as the perfect tools for consolidating these two perspectives to develop operational excellence in step with customer experience.”

Stefan Gammel, Business Process Consultant, Hilti Group

5. In-app support

Seamlessly integrating support features in a product, service, or system gives users easy access to directly request assistance within the interface, without needing to contact a support team or leave the platform. Built-In Support can include contextual, AI-assisted, self-service options like help application-specific documentation, troubleshooting tools, knowledge bases, and FAQs or real-time options like live chats with support engineers.

For example, WalkMe solutions and Built-In Support—layered over multiple applications in a business workflow—can provide real-time, proactive, in-app guidance to users, helping to significantly reduce the need for live assistance or support tickets.

“Context significantly enhances the quality of support. Built-In Support works like a pit stop at a racetrack. The repair crew is right where the action is. The interruption is brief and far less disruptive than taking your car to the workshop, ensuring a smoother return to your activities. In the context of your company, this helps you win your business race.” 

Wilhelm Jütte, Chief Product Owner, Customer Support, SAP

6. Proactive mindset

None of the tools and processes that we deploy to implement a proactive and preventative support strategy are sustainable if our teams are not tuned to a proactive mindset. I believe high-performing support teams deliver the best results with a combination of human-machine collaboration, in a culture that promotes a forward-thinking, outcome-driven, service-oriented, and data-driven mindset. 

At the end of the day, the best issue is the issue that we can prevent. Proactive and preventative support is not just about solving problems, but about creating peace of mind for end users, customers, partners, and support engineers so every customer receives custom care, even before they need help.

“Knowledge management within support is not just about enabling self-service through portals to deflect incoming tickets, but about eliminating the need to come to the support portal in the first place.”

Derek Matthews, Technical Support – Procurement Chief Innovation Officer, SAP

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.