Objective
In the previous lesson we looked at concepts such as data fabric, data mesh and data product. This lesson builds on those concepts by introducing SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Business Data Cloud is designed to provide organizations with a unified, business-centric view of all their data, regardless of where it resides (in SAP systems, non-SAP systems, cloud data lakes, or on-premises databases).
This lesson contains the following topic:
SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is a SaaS solution which represents an evolution in SAP's data strategy. This offering will combine new and existing technologies to provide users with curated and enriched data products, advanced analytics and cross-analytics, benchmarking data, and AI-powered intelligent applications that enable smart decisions and optimize business outcomes. As always this enables organizations to capitalize on their data. Currently data landscapes are built on significant existing investments and often include multiple technology stacks and comprehensive data tool chains. In addition many companies have disparate data lakes with data sources that lack a common semantic layer between the raw data and the business user helping them really understand how to interact with the data. This fragmented approach makes it difficult for businesses to extract the meaningful insights leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
SAP Business Data Cloud changes this. By harmonizing data across SAP and non-SAP systems, it creates a single, enriched source of truth, enabling leaders to uncover transformative insights, achieve real-time visibility, and fuel AI with accurate, contextualized information.
SAP Business Data Cloud isn’t just another data platform. It’s much more. SAP Business Data Cloud represents an evolution in SAP's data strategy. This new offering will combine new and existing technologies in such a way as to allow companies to:
By harmonizing data across SAP and non-SAP systems, SAP Business Data Cloud creates a semantically enriched asset that uncovers hidden patterns and enables smarter, faster decisions.
SAP integrates data seamlessly from every corner—applications, third-party sources, and hybrid clouds—providing leaders with a 360-degree view of operations. Robust governance, access to business content, cleanse and curated data, and a zero copy sharing mechanism are embedded in a fully SaaS managed experience.
With trusted, contextualized data, AI tools gain the foundation needed to deliver actionable and accurate results that align with real-world needs.
SAP Business Data Cloud brings together several of the technologies discussed in this unit while also adding some new ones. Let's take a look at how it is put together.One way to look at SAP Business Data Cloud is through its "layers" which are:
At the bottom layer are the source systems where data resides. These could be sap systems such as SAP Cloud ERP or SAP Ariba along with non-sap systems such as third party products and customer or partner built applications.
The next layer is the Data Products layer. You may recall from the previous lesson that a data product is a curated data set consisting of data, metadata, and standardized APIs. The data sets contained within a data product are available for consumption via its APIs. SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation Services is as the saying goes "where the magic happens". It’s role is to provide the technical foundation to land data from feeding SAP / non-SAP source systems to organize and to transform data into data products for consumption. SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation includes (but is not limited to) provisioning, data acquisition, transformation, data product assembly, observability, infrastructure (such as landscape and CI/CD), and platform services (such as APIs and metering). There are three types of data products (1) SAP data products, (2) customer data products and (3) partner data products. For purposes of our discussion we will focus on SAP data products while noting that the same rules would apply to both customer and partner oriented ones. It is important to note that SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation isn’t purchased directly by customers per se; it’s an independent service utilized indirectly via higher level consumption based layers.
SAP data products will be produced in, and served by, SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation by pushing data from SAP applications into the persistence layer of SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation which is based off of SAP HANA Data Lake. The API utilized by SAP data products will be based on the open source "Delta Sharing" API. Delta sharing in an open protocol for secure real-time exchange of large datasets between a "data provider" (i.e., SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation) and a "data recipient" (i.e., Power BI, tableau). This way regardless of the computing platforms used applications and organizations are able to share data.
SAP Business Data Cloud uses several components to establish its business data fabric. Whereas in the previous lesson we looked at these components individually SAP Business Data Cloud brings them together in a completely integrated fashion:
SAP Databricks is a fully SAP-managed version of the Databricks serverless lake house platform, from compute to storage, everything is fully integrated and embedded inside SAP Business Data Cloud.
Leveraging Apache Spark for large-scale processing, it seamlessly integrates data engineering, machine learning, and business intelligence. This allows organizations to combine structured SAP data with unstructured and semi-structured data from any source. SAP Databricks is a tailored, serverless offering where SAP manages the data storage and Databricks manages the compute infrastructure. This partnership provides organizations with leading AI/ML capabilities, complementing Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, and reinforces SAP's commitment to an open data ecosystem. Essentially, it bridges the gap between traditional business data and big data, empowering advanced analytics, AI/ML, and deeper business insights. SAP Databricks significantly strengthens SAP Business Data Cloud's analytical capabilities.
With SAP Business Data Cloud organizations can lift their existing SAP BW system to the cloud (private cloud edition) to safeguard their SAP BW investments and modernize their BW landscape at their own pace. By moving to SAP Business Data Cloud, they can expose and utilize their BW data as data products and leverage them alongside SAP-managed data products in addition to creating new use cases in SAP Datasphere or SAP Databricks. For a BW system to be integrated with SAP Business Data Cloud it must be either SAP BW 7.5 on HANA or SAP BW/4HANA. Neither on premise nor non HANA based SAP BW systems are supported.
SAP BW bridge offers customers the opportunity to implement their data warehousing use cases directly in SAP Business Data Cloud while protecting, and retaining their existing on-premises investments. While uplifting SAP BW to private cloud edition is the preferred approach, SAP BW Bridge can still be used in cases where access to business content and ECC extractors is needed as well as cases where the on premise BW system is being decommissioned in favor of utilizing SAP Business Data Cloud instead.
SAP Business Data Cloud Intelligent Applications are a suite of adaptive and AI-powered applications that learn from an organizations data, understand its business context, and act on the organizations behalf to transform business outcomes. They are built on a foundation of SAP data products, fully managed and incorporate pre-defined metrics, AI models, and planning capabilities. More specifically they are built on curated data products, SAP Datasphere models and SAP Analytics stories.
Whereas business content for SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud also include pre-built data models, analytics and planning content customers must configure and implement the content themselves. Once implemented the maintenance and management of the content is also done by the customer. Intelligent Applications by contrast are fully managed and installed via the SAP Business Data Cloud Cockpit. Once installed, the data products, data models, analytics and application assets are deployed and configured automatically. The prebuilt SAP managed data products installed with the intelligent application packages can also be utilized to build new insights and develop AI faster.
As SAP Business Data Cloud is an evolutionary product there are no changes to existing customers. SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BW4/HANA will continue to be available as separate products where SAP Business Data Cloud is not available. Even if it is available customers can continue to use the existing products as is and "switch" to SAP Business Data Cloud at contract renewal time. The migration to SAP Business Data Cloud will be simple and seamless.
New customers will utilize SAP Business Data Cloud where it’s available and where unavailable can utilize SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP BW4/HANA.
For a more in depth discussion of SAP Business Data Cloud please see: Introducing SAP Business Data Cloud
In summary, organizations have data scattered everywhere—in cloud applications, on-premise databases, data lakes, and partner systems. The different services as part of the "Data and Analytics" dimension of SAP BTP especially SAP Business Data Cloud provide a smart, unifying layer that connects disparate data without forcing organizations to move it all into one central location.