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.
Organizations that make data-driven decisions are facing three big challenges:
- How to build a single, complete data foundation to support the development of AI-based applications.
- How to boost confidence in their data quality and integrity to support data-driven decisions.
- How to extract the value from the huge stores of structured and unstructured data across the organization to derive business insights.
SAP Business Data Cloud was developed to address these key challenges.
SAP Business Data Cloud 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 AI.
By integrating all types of cross-company data, which includes structured and non-structured data, businesses gain actionable intelligence to bridge transactional processes and drive AI-powered growth.
SAP Business Data Cloud is a Software-as-a-Service solution. It is fully managed by SAP and customers purchase a subscription to consume its services.
SAP Business Data Cloud is built on the SAP Business Technology Platform which provides many important foundational services.
Let's introduce the key features of SAP Business Data Cloud.
Key Components
SAP Business Data Cloud combines existing SAP solutions with new software components.
The existing SAP solutions are:
- 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
New components of SAP Business Data Cloud are:
- SAP Databricks - to provide the data scientist with artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) development tools
- SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation Services - to manage the data products
Single solution for diverse audiences and use cases
SAP Business Data Cloud can handle many use-cases including:
- Support the development of AI and machine learning models
- Data Warehousing
- Planning and BI
- Data Governance and Compliance
- Development of intelligent applications
End-to-end data lifecycle managed by SAP
One of the key innovations of SAP Business Data Cloud is that SAP now take care of integrating and harmonizing data from all SAP line of business solutions (LoBs) such as S/4HANA, Successfactors, Ariba, Concur and Fieldglass. SAP takes care of ensuring the data from all source applications is replicated to SAP Business Data Cloud in real-time.
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 Business Data Cloud brings them together under one new domain. This means the business users does 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 Business Data Cloud.
Ready to use Content
A key highlight of SAP Business Data Cloud is its out-of-the-box analytics known as SAP Business Data Cloud Intelligent Applications. Intelligent Applications are based on predelivered artifacts and objects that may remind you of the well-known 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 process steps 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 creation of artifacts across all tools and components.
- Automated data management steps.
- Automated data provisioning from data source to dashboard.
- Automated ready-to-consume business insights.
SAP have been providing solutions to integrate data from various sources for many years. What makes SAP Business Data different is that not only does it build on the best features from each of these solutions, it also provides a fully managed data replication service for all SAP applications. SAP Business Data Cloud also provides out-of-the-box Intelligent Applications that can be installed with a few clicks, making this a business user task and no longer an IT task.
SAP have taken two of its most powerful data management and analytics solutions: SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, with the option to add an existing SAP BW, and the option to include the new SAP Databricks application, to provide a new platform that supports all use-cases for data and analytics.
Customers now have an opportunity to simply their data management and analytics landscape by moving away from multiple, individual source system-focussed solution to a single, unified, SAP-managed solution.
As well as the delivered out-of-the-box Intelligent Applications that bring SAP data together, SAP Business Cloud also provides the tools to develop your own custom data extraction, data models and dashboards, integrating data from any sources.
Note
From May 2025 the name Insight Apps was retired and replaced by the name Intelligent Applications. This was a name change only, and not a change to the technology.
In this lesson, you learned about the key innovations of SAP Business Data Cloud.
