SAP and Databricks Open a Bold New Era of Data and AI
Data stands as the bedrock of all modern enterprises. It is the unwavering cornerstone of all digital transformation and the driving force behind artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on five decades of experience running mission-critical processes across every industry, we’ve seen the transformative power of business data.
Today, SAP announced SAP Business Data Cloud, a fully managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that unifies and governs all SAP data and seamlessly connects with third-party data. As an evolution of our industry-leading data, planning, and analytics solutions, SAP Business Data Cloud brings together SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse with a unified experience that delivers transformational insights across all lines of business.
SAP also announced a landmark partnership with Databricks that brings the power of Databricks directly into SAP Business Data Cloud. This marks a new era in enterprise data management, with two leaders in their domains coming together to redefine how applications and data platforms work together.
Unleash transformative insights
Many organizations still grapple with data they cannot trust. This persistent gap in trust remains a barrier to true innovation in data and AI.
A global survey of 1,200 business and technology leaders found that 55 percent cite poor data quality as their biggest challenge. And nearly half of these leaders pointed to the difficulty of harmonizing data across ecosystems as a key reason that innovation stalls.
SAP Business Data Cloud bridges this gap with a trusted and harmonized data foundation, empowering IT and business leaders with full business context to drive more impactful decisions.
SAP Business Data Cloud delivers fully managed SAP data products across all business processes. These curated data products align to a highly optimized and unified “one domain model,” maintaining their original business context and semantics, which means you get immediate access to high-quality data you can trust.
Since these data products are fully managed by SAP, you no longer bear the hidden costs of rebuilding and maintaining data extracts. The SaaS experience simplifies life cycle management, ensures data consistency, and enables zero-copy sharing across your data and analytics ecosystem.
With these data products, SAP Business Data Cloud delivers a suite of pre-built analytical applications that help you uncover hidden insights and fast-track decision-making. These “insight apps” are fully managed and incorporate pre-defined metrics, AI models, and planning capabilities, simplifying how you connect and integrate every part of your business.
This accelerates use cases aligned with your most important business functions, including ERP, spend, supply chain, HR, customer experience, and finance.
Every organization needs a pulse on its most important resources. With insight apps, you can use preconfigured packages already connected to your business data, such as working capital, to gain a 360-degree view of your organization’s financial health with real-time visibility into cash flow and profitability.
Connect all your data
SAP Business Data Cloud connects all your data by leveraging business data fabric principles, making it easier to discover, share, govern, and model your data. It includes Databricks as a first-party data service, bringing the power of Databricks directly in SAP Business Data Cloud.
- Business semantics: Use SAP Datasphere to discover, share, and model the same trusted data across existing platforms without costly data extraction. Build a powerful knowledge graph of all your data, preserving its business metadata and semantics, so your data is easily searchable and actionable. For existing SAP Datasphere customers, your investments remain fully supported—with no disruptions—and all SAP Datasphere capabilities will natively be available in SAP Business Data Cloud.
- Data engineering and machine learning/AI: SAP and Databricks empower every data professional to accelerate AI models and generative AI apps on their business data. Native capabilities like Delta Sharing harmonize SAP data products with existing lakehouses bi-directionally. By integrating all your data with a zero-copy approach, you can apply advanced AI and machine learning models to finance use cases, like predicting the payment date on open receivables.
- SAP Business Warehouse modernization: SAP Business Data Cloud gives on-premise SAP Business Warehouse customers a flexible path to the cloud. With native integration to SAP Business Warehouse, easily access your data as a data product with the object store via Delta Share—simplifying your modernization journey and maximizing your SAP Business Warehouse investment.
- Analytics and planning: SAP Business Data Cloud brings analytics and planning together in one solution, enabling you to go from insights to actions instantly. Automate reporting, simulate possible business outcomes with AI, and unify your financial, supply chain, and operational planning—all in a connected view.
“SAP Business Data Cloud will help us unlock the value of our data and drive innovation across our business,” said Markus Hartmann, corporate vice president and head of Business Technology at Henkel. “Its semantically rich data products and deep Databricks integration will connect and enhance our existing data products, ensuring long-term adaptability. Trusted, business-ready data will empower users to model scenarios and leverage AI insights, building a sustainable and flexible future for our data ecosystems.”
Foster reliable AI
The rapid growth of agentic AI requires organizations to first have the right data foundation. SAP Business Data Cloud brings together all your data to ensure agentic AI is built on accurate, trusted data with business context.
Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot, is deeply integrated with SAP Business Data Cloud. The knowledge graph in SAP Business Data Cloud connects your data, metadata, and business processes, enabling AI agents, Joule, and large language models (LLMs) to understand your data within the context of its relationships.
This mapping creates clear data links, making insights more reliable for users and applications. Training AI agents and Joule on business knowledge and context drives increased productivity. For instance, users can use AI to complete cross-functional tasks, uncover insights, and summarize critical information across the business—without heavy reliance on IT support. This empowers the usage of AI to automate complex analytics and planning tasks, such as risk assessment, forecasting, and other advanced scenario simulations.
SAP Business Data Cloud ecosystem
At the core, SAP Business Data Cloud is built to prioritize openness and customer choice. To simplify your data landscape, SAP Business Data Cloud supports an open data ecosystem. It integrates natively with leading data and AI partners like Collibra, Confluent, and DataRobot. And it doesn’t stop there; we’ll announce new strategic partnerships in the coming weeks and months to further expand the open data ecosystem.
Supported by our large partner ecosystem, we’ve made it easier to unleash transformative insights from all your data. We have partners with deep business process and industry domain expertise that are building insight apps on SAP Business Data Cloud.
From data enrichment to data activation, partner insight apps build on top of the data products and the core services SAP Business Data Cloud provides. We’re thrilled to announce our first partner apps with Accenture, DataRobot, Spendscape by McKinsey, PwC, EY, Deloitte, and Capgemini.
Get started today
Start your journey with SAP Business Data Cloud and unleash the power of AI with trusted business data:
- Experience SAP Business Data Cloud with the guided product tour
- Register for the upcoming webinar: “30-Minute Primer on SAP Business Data Cloud”
- Learn more about SAP Business Data Cloud
Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer for SAP Data and Analytics at SAP.
