In this lesson, you will discover SAP Business Data Cloud and its key innovations that address the challenges that organizations are currently facing when they want to make data-driven decisions.
Describing SAP Business Data Cloud
Objective
After completing this lesson, you will be able to describe the advantages of SAP Business Data Cloud.
Introduction
SAP Business Data Cloud
Organizations that run SAP applications have collected a huge amount of extremely valuable data that spans all business processes. These organizations are keen to use their SAP data to develop advanced analytics and build AI-based applications.
But organizations that run SAP applications face some challenges to access their SAP data. They have asked SAP for:
- Easier access to their SAP data without the need for complex data preparation steps.
- Access to all SAP data from all Line of Business (LoB) applications, such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Ariba.
- A unified business view of their data regardless of which SAP application it originated from.
- A trusted and secure data foundation that they can use to build reliable AI applications.
- Provide business users with ready-to-use intelligent applications so they can get started quickly gaining insights using their data.
- Reduced complexity of their data management landscape by using fewer technologies and tools.
SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) was developed to address all of these customer requirements.
SAP BDC is a data platform that harmonizes all data from SAP and non-SAP sources, into a unified semantic layer of trusted data, to power advanced analytics and to build AI applications.
By integrating all types of cross-company data, which includes structured - for example, transactional and master data, and non-structured data - for example, emails, businesses collect actionable intelligence to bridge transactional processes and drive AI-powered growth.
SAP BDC is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution fully managed by SAP. Customers purchase a subscription to consume the cloud services of SAP BDC.
Data Products
One of the most important innovations of SAP BDC are the data products.
Data products are ready-to-use data sets provided and managed by SAP. Data products represent business subjects or entities such as customer, product, or sales invoice. Data products contain not just one field of data, but all the fields required to form a complete data set. Data products support transactional and master data, but very importantly, all data products include the essential meta-data that describes the meaning of the data. A data product also includes descriptive information that is used by business users for discovery. Data products cover all source applications across the entire SAP ERP and LoB application range.
By providing out-of-the-box data products, SAP has addressed the challenge of providing customers with easy and fast access to their SAP data.
Data products are fully managed by SAP which means the data replication from the source system to the SAP BDC storage is handled by SAP. Customers select the required data products from a user-friendly cockpit. They are easily installed by customers with just a few clicks. The need for customers to build complex data pipelines to pull data from SAP applications is no longer needed.
Software Components of SAP Business Data Cloud
SAP BDC combines existing best-of-breed SAP solutions with new software components.
SAP has taken its two flagship data management and analytics solutions, SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud and they have embedded SAP Databricks. SAP has also provided the opportunity for customers to include their existing SAP BW in their SAP BDC landscape.
Let's list the software components of SAP BDC.
The existing SAP solutions that are part of the architecture of SAP BDC:
- SAP Datasphere - to provide the data integration and modeling layer
- SAP Anaytics Cloud - to provide the analysis layer
- SAP BW - if a customer already has SAP BW, this can be used as a data source.
The new software components of SAP BDC:
- SAP Databricks - to provide AI and machine learning development tools.
- SAP BDC Foundation Services - to manage the data products in a single domain model.
SAP BDC is not a replacement for SAP Datasphere or SAP BW. SAP BDC is a super-set of those solutions and adds many more capabilities including machine learning and AI development. SAP Datasphere is an essential component of SAP BDC. SAP BW, if required, can also play an important role in SAP BDC. SAP BDC is an evolution of the data fabric that SAP began developing with SAP Datasphere.
Single solution for diverse audiences and use cases
SAP BDC can handle many use-cases including:
- Development of AI and machine learning models
- Data Warehousing
- Planning and BI
- Data Governance and Compliance
- Development of intelligent applications to support all business processes.
SAP BDC is built to serve all personas of the organization.
End-to-end data lifecycle managed by SAP
SAP BDC integrates and harmonizes data from all SAP line-of-business solutions (LoBs) such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, and Fieldglass. SAP takes care of ensuring the data from all source applications is replicated to SAP BDC in real-time so this is no longer the responsibility of the customer.
In the past, customers had to take care of preparing the SAP data and combining it before it was ready for use in analytic scenarios. Customers can now invest their time and money on added-value projects such as delivering AI solutions, and not on time-consuming preparation of data from the various SAP applications.
One Domain Model
Data from all SAP applications is combined and made available to the business user under a single domain model. This means that in cases when different SAP applications define the same business entity, for example, customer or employee, SAP BDC brings them together under one new domain. This means that the business users do not need to care about where the data originates, because they only work with one harmonized definition of the entity. All valuable meta data from the source systems is also collected and stored with the entity so no business meaning is lost during the replication to SAP BDC.
Fast Access to Insights with SAP Content
A key deliverable of SAP BDC are the ready-to-run analytics known as Intelligent Applications.
Intelligent Applications are based on predelivered artifacts and objects that may remind you of the well-known SAP-delivered business content in SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Datasphere, or SAP Analytics Cloud. But there's a significant difference to the existing concepts. Unlike before, all artifacts, objects, and business data for a ready-to-consume full-stack application are included, and are fully managed by SAP. Specifically, here is what happens when you install an Intelligent Application:
- Automated generation of dashboards, the underlying data models and the data pipelines from SAP source applications.
- Automated data provisioning from data source to dashboard to ensure real-time data is provided to the business user.
- Automated generation of roles that can be assinged to authorized business users.
With just a few clicks, an Intelligent Application is installed and is ready to use by the business user who can get started quickly gaining insights from their SAP data. SAP is responsible for the end-to-end delivery and ongoing maintenance of the Intelligent Applications. There is no need for the customer to mange the initial and ongoing data replication from their SAP source applications, this is taken care of by SAP as a fully managed service. Installing an Intelligent Application is a straight-forward business administrator task, and no longer a specialized IT task.
As well as the delivered out-of-the-box Intelligent Applications, SAP Business Cloud also provides the tools to develop your own analytical applications using custom data extraction, data models, and dashboards, integrating data from any SAP and third-party sources.
Built on SAP Business Technology Platform
SAP BDC is built on SAP Business Technology Platform.
This means IT teams will already be already be familiar with the infrastructure of SAP BDC.
Many of the services of SAP Business Technology Platform are used in SAP BDC, for example:
- Unified Customer Landscape (UCL) used to connect the SAP BDC components, such as SAP Dataspshere and SAP Analytics Cloud.
- SAP HANA Cloud provides the data storage and compute layer.
- Security and Compliance to manage access and permissions and regulatory compliance.
- SAP Build to provide developer tools to build your own applications on SAP BDC data.
Open Data Ecosystem
To support SAP's business data fabric, SAP BDC is built on the principle of openness across the entire data ecosystem. SAP has partnered with well-known data management vendors to ensure customers can combine their SAP BDC solution with partner solutions.
SAP BDC Connect Partners
SAP recognizes that many customers already use external data platforms to manage their non-SAP data. Customers want to integrate their external data platforms with SAP BDC to form a complete picture of their business data. This is especially important for AI / ML projects that require a complete data set on which to build intelligent applications.
SAP has developed partnerships with the major data platform providers for bidirectionally data sharing.
An example of such a partnership is with Databricks. Today, organizations who run Databricks can share SAP BDC data products to the Unity catalog of Databricks, to use in data science projects. It also works the other way round. Databricks can share the data generated from data science projects with SAP BDC.
More partnerships with the vendors of external data platforms have been announced. These include Microsoft Fabric, Google BigQuery and Snowflake.
The key technology that enables bidirectional data sharing between SAP BDC and external data platforms is the SAP BDC Connect component. SAP BDC Connect implements the delta-share protocol that uses a zero-copy approach to data sharing. This means that instead of copying the data between platforms, the data remains in its original location and is shared with other platforms.
SAP customers who do not already run external data platforms can still bring the features of those platforms into SAP BDC. SAP and external data platform vendors have worked together to develop SAP-specific variants of the data platforms. The first example is SAP Databricks. SAP BDC customers can choose to provision the fully embedded SAP Databricks into their solution. SAP Databricks includes the advanced tooling required to build AI and ML on SAP data products. SAP BDC Connect is not required when using the embedded version of SAP Databricks.
SAP Snowflake was recently included as a Solution Extension to SAP BDC. This means the full Snowflake platform is now accessible to SAP BDC customers who can choose to include this as an extension to their SAP BDC landscape. Again, SAP BDC Connect is not required for SAP Snowflake.
Open Data Partners
In addition to the data-sharing partners, SAP has also partnered with vendors who offer capabilities that compliment what is already provided with SAP BDC.
The list of open data ecosystem partners is long and is constantly growing. Let's highlight three of these partners and describe what they provide:
- DataRobot - Provides pure-play AI for customers who want to build AI quickly using templates, without the need for large teams of data scientists.
- Collibra - Provides comprehensive governance and cataloging of all data assets that span multiple data platforms.
- Confluent - Provides bi-directional streaming services at scale.
Let's Summarize What You've Learned
In this lesson, you learned about the key innovations of SAP Business Data Cloud and how they address the current challenges faced by organizations.
SAP Business Data Cloud harmonizes SAP and non SAP data into one semantic layer, delivering trusted data for analytics and AI.
SAP Business Data Cloud provides a SAP-managed, subscription-based service with real-time data replication from SAP applications, reducing data preparation to decrease time to insights.
SAP Business Data Cloud uses a single domain model to harmonize business entities from all SAP applications and preserve metadata.
SAP Business Data Cloud includes SAP-managed intelligent applications and data products to provide ready-to-consume insights installable by business users.
- SAP Business Data Cloud supports an open data ecosystem approach integrating with external data platform vendors.