Explaining the Customer Challenges Addressed by SAP Business Data Cloud

Today’s businesses are working with more data than ever—from internal systems to customers, suppliers, and external sources. Yet despite having so much data, much of it remains underutilized. That’s because it’s often scattered across different systems, stored in various formats, and not readily accessible when needed. This fragmentation makes it difficult to get a clear view of the business, respond quickly, or drive innovation. In an increasingly competitive and fast-changing market, the inability to harness trusted, connected data becomes a serious barrier to agility, efficiency, and long-term success.

Organizations that make data-driven decisions today face three big challenges:

1. Uncovering the hidden potential in their business by unlocking seamless access to critical insights.
2. Boosting confidence in their data quality and integrity to empower data-driven decisions.
3. Harnessing the power of fragmented, unstructured data sources to turn them into valuable business insights.

More specifically, let's outline the key data challenges faced by companies aiming to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and insights for business transformation. These include:

1. The inconsistent access to SAP Lines of Business (LoB) data
2. The need for business-ready data with context, since data preparation for analytics is costly, complex, and time-consuming
3. The difficulty in harmonizing data from multiple SAP applications
4. The requirement for better data storage options
5. The desire for a simplified data landscape to reduce costs and accelerate insights
6. The deep knowledge & significant resource investment when building analytics and data-rich applications on top of SAP and enterprise data.

SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) was built to address these key challenges. It centralizes data from SAP and non-SAP sources into a unified semantic layer, unlocking a new dimension of insights, advanced analytics, and AI capabilities.

By integrating cross-company data, businesses gain actionable intelligence to bridge transactional processes and drive AI-powered growth. SAP’s AI agents can then leverage accurate, context-rich data from both SAP and non-SAP systems to deliver advanced automation and seamless cross-solution collaboration. This empowers innovative decision-making and enables businesses to adapt, innovate, and thrive at scale. Every part of the business becomes deeply connected, driving today’s digital-first world.

Watch the video to discover data challenges that businesses face today.

To summarize, many companies understand how important data is, especially for using AI and driving business growth. However, they still face major challenges in getting the trusted, business-ready data they need. Customers say it's hard to consistently access data from different SAP applications—some tools work well with certain systems like SAP S/4HANA, but not with others like SAP Concur or SAP Ariba. Even when they get the data, it often lacks the original meaning or context, making it difficult to use for insights. Preparing data for analysis or AI is time-consuming and expensive, especially when combining information from multiple SAP systems, each with different formats. As data volumes grow, businesses also want better storage options, simpler data systems, and faster ways to turn data into insights—without relying on many tools or spending too much time and effort.