Overview
SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is a new cloud-based offering from SAP designed to help organizations transform their fragmented data into trusted, business-ready insights—and, ultimately, into AI-driven outcomes.
Typically, for businesses that use SAP, data is spread across multiple systems—SAP and non-SAP, both structured and unstructured—making it difficult to access, trust, and analyze in a unified way. Business Data Cloud aims to address these challenges by creating a unified data foundation that integrates, harmonizes, and enriches data, making it ready for analytics and intelligent applications.
Why is SAP Business Data Cloud Useful?
SAP Business Data Cloud addresses several key business and technical pain points:
- Build a comprehensive data foundation for AI-based applications: BDC enables companies to prepare and manage high-quality data necessary for developing AI/ML-powered apps and tools.
- Boost confidence in data quality: By centralizing and managing data from multiple systems, BDC ensures consistency, governance, and reliability—making data-driven decisions easier and more trustworthy.
- Unlock value from data silos: Business Data Cloud helps organizations tap into both structured and unstructured data sources, breaking down silos and enabling rich business insights.
- Reduce cost and complexity: Technologies like Delta Sharing help minimize the need for large-scale data replication, reducing data movement costs while keeping information up to date.
Key Capabilities and Components
At a high level, Business Data Cloud brings together several components into one integrated experience. Let’s go over them.
Source Systems
Business Data Cloud connects to a wide range of source systems, including both SAP and non-SAP systems. These include:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- SAP SuccessFactors
- SAP Business Warehouse (BW) systems
- Non-SAP applications and databases
- Unstructured data sources
This connectivity enables organizations to consolidate all relevant business data into a single location.
Foundation Services
Foundation Services acts as the core of Business Data Cloud. It:
- Harmonizes and enriches data from source systems
- Creates Data Products—pre-packaged, business-ready datasets
- Manages data quality and governance
- Runs on scalable SAP HANA Cloud infrastructure
Foundation Services reduces the need for manual data preparation, ensuring that the data is ready for analysis and AI.
Data & Administration Layers
Once Data Products are created, they flow into the modeling and data science layers of BDC:
- SAP Datasphere: Provides advanced data modeling, a unified semantic layer, and governance tools
- SAP Databricks: Supports advanced AI/ML development and enriches Data Products with new insights
- SAP Business Warehouse (BW): Legacy SAP BW objects can be brought into BDC and extended
Intelligent Applications & Analytics
This is the layer most visible to end users and business stakeholders:
- Intelligent Applications: Pre-built, AI-powered business apps developed by SAP to support use cases like forecasting, planning, or sales optimization. These apps are visual, interactive, and designed to be used without technical expertise.
- SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC): The main analytics interface where business users interact with dashboards, visualizations, and forecasts. SAC uses the trusted Data Products in BDC to deliver insights across the organization.
For many business users, these applications will be the primary means by which they interact with Business Data Cloud, providing them with fast access to actionable insights.
Who is Business Data Cloud For?
Line-of-Business Leaders & Decision Makers
- Pain Points: Struggle with siloed data; need quick, trustworthy insights without technical complexity.
- Value: Pre-built Intelligent Applications provide AI-powered insights tailored to business use cases.
Data Engineers & Data Architects
- Pain Points: Complex data pipelines, difficult integrations, data quality concerns.
- Value: A centralized data platform reduces manual integration work and provides governed, high-quality data.
Business Analysts & Data Scientists
- Pain Points: Limited access to clean, integrated data; difficult to present technical findings to business stakeholders.
- Value: Seamless environment combining advanced AI tools (via SAP Databricks) and user-friendly dashboards (via SAC and Intelligent Applications).
Summary
SAP Business Data Cloud represents SAP’s next-generation approach to data management, analytics, and AI. It brings together your company’s critical data—regardless of where it resides—into a single, governed environment, enabling faster insights and AI-powered applications across the business.
Whether you’re a decision maker, a data engineer, or a data scientist, Business Data Cloud offers tools to simplify and accelerate the journey from raw data to business outcomes.
