In today’s business environment, organizations are navigating an overwhelming surge of data coming from every direction—internal systems, customer interactions, supply chains, and external markets. While data holds immense potential, the reality is that much of it remains scattered across silos, locked in incompatible formats, or inaccessible in real time. This fragmentation hinders agility, clouds decision-making, and slows innovation. As markets evolve rapidly and competition intensifies, companies need more than just access to data—they need clarity, coherence, and the ability to act on insights with confidence and speed.
This is where SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) makes a critical difference. It simplifies complex data landscapes by integrating information from SAP and third-party systems into a unified, governed environment. With real-time access to harmonized data across the enterprise, SAP BDC enables confident, insight-driven decisions. This empowers organizations to optimize operations, accelerate innovation, and stay agile in the face of change—turning data into a powerful driver of business outcomes.
What is SAP Business Data Cloud?
SAP BDC is a fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution designed to unify, govern, and make sense of data across the entire business landscape. It brings together SAP and non-SAP data into one trusted, business-ready foundation—enabling decision-makers to access real-time insights with full context. By connecting siloed information through a powerful semantic layer and open data ecosystem, SAP BDC transforms raw data into a strategic asset.
With SAP BDC, customers can:
Unleash transformative insights
Empower decision-makers with prebuilt, business-contextual applications that deliver insights tailored to their specific roles and needs.
Connect all data
Harmonize all mission-critical data with an open data ecosystem, leveraging a powerful semantic layer to give them an unmatched knowledge of their business.
Foster reliable Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Ensure data across applications and operations has a foundation for generative AI that is reliable, responsible, and relevant.
Transforming Data Management and Analytics: Launching SAP Business Data Cloud
SAP Business Suite embodies our vision to bring together all applications, data, and AI like never before. Alongside this innovation, we introduced a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering called SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC), marking the next evolution of our data, planning, and analytics capabilities. This is one of the most significant launches in SAP history, positioning us to excel in the data and AI space – a market that is nearly ten times larger than RISE with SAP.
With SAP BDC, our customers can significantly reduce IT overhead and data maintenance, leading to substantial cost savings and improved productivity. Simply put, only SAP can provide the right mission-critical data, fully trusted to ensure compliance.
Today, our customers still struggle to work with their SAP data. Here's an analogy: imagine a piece of paper represents the SAP data of our customers. It doesn't reside in the system neatly, but rather, it has numerous interconnections and context. When customers export data from SAP systems as they currently do, they transfer it to an external data lake, losing all its context. Afterwards, they try to reconstruct the structure, which is highly resource-intensive and leads to inconsistencies. Consequently, the data is never quite the same, and, even worse, these new insights cannot be reintegrated back into transactional systems.
With SAP BDC, we are changing the game by seamlessly combining two things like never before. First is the mission-critical, high-fidelity business data from our SAP applications, complete with all its essential business context. Second, SAP Databricks, the world's leading data platform, is now available within SAP BDC, allowing you to process any data at any scale within the SAP environment. Additionally, you can share consistent data outside of SAP as we break down silos and unify data landscapes.
Consider a fast-food retailer. They deal with high volumes of fresh items with short shelf life. Instead of extracting data from SAP systems and reconstructing all the business logic, customers can now use SAP BDC to quickly retrieve product inventory from the SAP system with complete business context. Then, they can seamlessly combine it with various external data sources, such as weather data, third-party geolocation data, and more. This aggregated data set is processed within the SAP Databricks environment through machine learning models to develop fine-grained forecasts by store location. The outcome is the elimination of substantial food waste and the realization of significant savings for the customer.
To summarize: first, we ensure compliance and governance by providing trusted and accurate data from every SAP business process, easily accessible at your fingertips. Second, we harmonize data across SAP and non-SAP landscapes like never before. Third, we offer a single trusted data foundation for analytics and AI. Importantly, we now offer a future-proof modernization path for our thousands of business warehouse customers, as SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) becomes an integral part of SAP BDC.
Looking ahead, we will consistently position SAP Business Suite as the vision for our entire portfolio: unrivaled SAP applications that generate the world's most mission-critical business data, combined with SAP BDC to unleash transformative insights, connect all data, and foster reliable AI.
Let's Summarize What You've Learned
- In today’s complex data landscape, SAP BDC helps organizations overcome data silos by unifying information across systems and delivering real-time access, governance, and clarity for confident, insight-driven decisions.
- As a fully managed SaaS solution, SAP BDC connects SAP and non-SAP data into a harmonized, trusted foundation, providing role-specific insights and enabling scalable, reliable AI through its semantic layer and open ecosystem.
- By integrating with tools like SAP Databricks and combining critical business context with external data, SAP BDC supports high-impact use cases such as predictive analytics and operational optimization, unlocking efficiency and significant cost savings.
- SAP BDC is central to SAP’s strategy to lead in data and AI, powering the modernization of SAP BW, enhancing RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP, and unifying SAP’s portfolio under a future-ready solution.
- Looking ahead, SAP BDC will be embedded in key customer initiatives—from warehouse migrations to AI strategies—driven by close collaboration with Databricks and a growing portfolio of SAP Business Data Cloud Intelligent Apps.