Introducing SAP Business Data Cloud

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to describe the key functionality of SAP Business Data Cloud in relation to data analytics.

What is SAP Business Data Cloud?

In this lesson, we introduce you to SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Business Data Cloud is a Software-as-a-Service solution equipped with data and analytics services. With SAP Business Technology Platform providing foundational services, SAP Business Data Cloud combines strategic solutions such as SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Datasphere, and SAP Analytics Cloud and their respective capabilities into one single solution.

This lesson is temporarily included in all SAP Analytics Cloud learning journeys, so if you have previously completed the Introducing Business Data Cloud learning journey or have seen this lesson in another SAP Analytics Cloud learning journey, please continue to the next lesson.

The Advantages of SAP Business Data Cloud

In this lesson, you'll discover the main advantages provided by SAP Business Data Cloud and its key innovations that meet the challenges of organizations that want to make data-driven decisions.

Realizing our vision by bringing together applications, data, and AI. SAP is uniquely positioned to lead companies into this new era of enterprise management. SAP Business AI (Joule, SAP Foundational Model, and SAP Knowledge Graph), SAP Business Data Cloud (one semantic layer, Data Products), and SAP applications that are comprehensive, modular, and extensible.

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

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

SAP Business Data Cloud was built to address these key challenges.

SAP 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 leverage accurate, context-rich data from both SAP and non-SAP systems to deliver advanced automation, seamless cross-solution collaboration, and innovative decision-making, enabling businesses to adapt, innovate, and thrive at scale. Every part of the business is deeply connected, driving today’s digital first world.

Note

Feel free to get a comprehensive overview of SAP Business Data Cloud and discover its features: Demo: SAP Business Data Cloud
SAP Business Data Cloud diagram includes the SAP Data Fabric (business semantics, analytics and planning, data engineering and ML, BW modernization), and the Insight Apps (third-party apps, 360 degree analytics and extended planning).

Let's introduce the core innovations of SAP Business Data Cloud that drive these changes.

One solution for all data and analytics requirements

SAP Business Data Cloud is a Software-as-a-Service solution equipped with data and analytics services needed in a modern world. Together with SAP Business Technology Platform providing foundational services, SAP Business Data Cloud combines strategic solutions such as SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Datasphere, and SAP Analytics Cloud and their capabilities in one single solution.

Single solution for diverse audiences and use cases

What makes SAP Business Data Cloud so powerful, is that it offers the tools and technologies to meet all data and analytics requirements of a modern and agile organization. It uses the latest technology to support scenarios such as:

  • Out-of-the-box reporting.
  • Machine learning and artificial intelligence.
  • Advanced data modeling and data warehousing.
  • Powerful planning and reporting.
  • Intelligent data management.

SAP Business Data Cloud provides data warehousing features including a manual data integration and data modeling approach, AI and machine learning based extensions of data models as well as innovative out-of-the-box reporting capabilities side-by-side. With this wide range of functions, it covers all the requirements of a modern data and analytics solution and thus serves different target audiences with different requirements.

End-to-end data lifecycle managed by SAP

One of the core innovations of SAP Business Data Cloud is that SAP's role as a provider goes beyond the tasks that maintain security, availability, and performance in a Software-as-a-Service landscape. Rather, SAP uses its knowledge and experience to bundle, integrate, harmonize, and transform customers' business data across different business applications such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Customer Experience or SAP SuccessFactors in an unprecedented approach. To prepare for seamless use across all SAP Business Data Cloud scenarios and third-party tools, the business data that is managed by SAP is integrated into a hyperscaler environment, and undergoes cleansing, harmonization, and enrichment.

Out-of-the-box reporting

A key highlight of SAP Business Data Cloud is its out-of-the-box reporting capability, featuring Insight Apps, which create business insights with a single click, empowering informed decision-making. The concept of this feature is based on predelivered artifacts and objects that may remind you at the first glance on 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 fully managed by SAP. Specifically, here is what happens when you install an Insight App:

  • 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.

In this lesson, you learned about SAP Business Data Cloud's core innovations with the wide range of functionalities such as the out-of-the-box reporting with Insight Apps, and the main advantages provided by SAP Business Data Cloud.

Architecture of SAP Business Data Cloud

This lesson offers an overview of SAP Business Data Cloud's architecture, introducing you to the core components and their respective tasks, and helping you understand how they work together to enable business insights and decision-making.

SAP Business Data Cloud architecture diagram with different interconnected components presented in the following text.

As illustrated in the graphic, the SAP Business Data Cloud system landscape consists of different interconnected components. Each component plays an important role in SAP Business Data Cloud, with specific tasks that are outlined in the following sections.

Source Systems

We start by examining the source systems, which encompass both SAP systems (for example, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition or SAP SuccessFactors) and non-SAP systems. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition serving as an example, the data journey begins when SAP bundles customer business data, making it available for various analytical use cases within SAP Business Data Cloud. Entities such as tables and views are combined and made available to represent a specific business scenario (for example, working capital) before the data is replicated to SAP Business Data Cloud.

Foundation Services

When analysis is required, the bundled data from your source system (for example, SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition) is replicated into the Foundation Services of SAP Business Data Cloud. This data is then harmonized with other relevant business data from other business applications, transformed, and enriched to become a Data Product. From this moment on, it is located in a hyperscaler environment based on SAP HANA Cloud, Data Lake files and is ready to be used for every use case that is supported by SAP Business Data Cloud. What this means for you is that all necessary data management steps such as integration, transformation, cleansing, and so on are fully managed by SAP.

SAP Datasphere

At the heart of SAP Business Data Cloud is SAP Datasphere, which provides the foundational structures that define the data model on top of the Data Products. This includes predelivered Insight App and Data Product scenarios but also scenarios with custom data models that can be manually extended with machine learning or AI. SAP Datasphere also serves as a central tool for managing analytical roles and data access control, helping you to determine which business users can view specific data.

SAP Databricks

An SAP-tailored Databricks component (called SAP Databricks) is used in SAP Business Data Cloud when extending your analytics with functions that are based on AI, machine learning, and Pro-Code engineering. There are different approaches to make this possible. On the one hand, you can share Data Products from SAP Business Data Cloud Catalog with SAP Databricks, to extend them accordingly and to push them back to SAP Business Data Cloud Catalog. On the other hand, you can share data directly from SAP Databricks into SAP Business Data Cloud Catalog. In both cases, your data models can be extended to enrich classic analytics with insights that are usually implemented by Data Scientists.

SAP BW or SAP BW/4HANA

SAP BW has a rich history in SAP's data and analytics ecosystem, with a large collection of established, legacy objects. For these reasons, it is integrated into SAP Business Data Cloud if you use the SAP BW Netweaver Cloud, private edition or the SAP BW/4HANA Cloud, private edition. The approach makes it possible to technically onboard SAP BW objects into SAP Business Data Cloud, allowing them to be used as Data Products. Within this framework, SAP BW is supported until 2030, but we recommend taking the modern approach with SAP BW/4HANA as soon as possible.

SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud stories are used to provide the required dashboard in out-of-the-box reporting scenarios with Insight Apps. With its advanced visualization and planning functions, SAP Analytics Cloud serves the business user as a central tool for exploring the requested business insights or executing planning functions. Furthermore, using SAP Analytics Cloud, business users can run ad-hoc analysis, explore the provided data with AI-driven chat capabilities, or act on their insights with AI-driven suggestions, bridging the gap between analytics and their end-to-end business processes.

Insight Apps

Insight Apps are not limited exclusively to SAP Analytics Cloud. In addition to the analytical dashboards, or planning templates provided by SAP Analytics Cloud, it is planned to provide SAP Business Technology Platform based Insight Apps. These SAP managed Software-as-a-Service applications are delivered in SAP Business Data Cloud to focus on various action-driven scenarios such as analytics, prediction, or forecasting.

SAP Business Data Cloud cockpit

The SAP Business Data Cloud cockpit has an important role in the overall SAP Business Data Cloud landscape. With this tool you can browse and find predelivered Insight Apps and Data Products, install Insight Apps, and share Data Products with SAP Databricks to be able to extend them with AI, and machine learning capabilities..

In this lesson, you discovered the overall architecture of SAP Business Data Cloud and the main tasks of each component.

Additional Learning

SAP Business Data Cloud and its associated data engineering and data analysis components (including the new Insight Apps) are covered in more detail in the Introducing Business Data Cloud learning journey.

Log in to track your progress & complete quizzes