Introduction
Let’s understand what is SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is a unified data platform which means a single environment that harmonizes information from all SAP and non-SAP sources into a trusted semantic layer. BDC can be the organization’s single source of truth which provides a consistent, governed layer of data that everyone can use, whether it’s for analytics, planning, or building AI Applications.
But the bigger topic is why do we even need something like SAP Business Data Cloud?
Why do we need Business Data Cloud?
Today every organization is talking about being ‘data-driven.’ We all want to make decisions based on real insights rather than gut feeling. But in reality, its not that easy. the truth is data is everywhere. But it’s rarely in one place or in one consistent format. Businesses have information scattered across multiple systems . Like some in SAP applications like S/4HANA or SuccessFactors, some in non-SAP platforms, spreadsheets, or even external sources like partners and IoT devices. So when companies try to bring that data together for analytics or AI, they face a few very real challenges.
How do you build a single, complete data foundation that supports modern AI and machine learning models? How do you trust your data? how do you ensure quality, consistency, and integrity so that the decisions you make are actually reliable? How do you extract real business value from this massive, mixed pool of structured and unstructured data?
SAP recognized that these are the exact pain points stopping companies from truly using data to their advantage. And that’s what led to the creation of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC).
One of the major innovations behind BDC is how it eliminates data fragmentation. Instead of moving data between systems and losing context along the way, BDC integrates data in real time while preserving its business meaning. For example, if the same business entity, say a customer exists in multiple SAP systems, BDC brings together under a unified definition using the One Domain Model. So business users don’t have to worry about where the data came from or how it’s structured. They simply work with consistent, harmonized business entities that are ready for analytics, reporting, or Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The best part is SAP fully manages the entire lifecycle. BDC is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service solution built on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). Because of that all the integration, replication, and governance are handled by SAP. In the past, customers had to manually extract and prepare SAP data before it was usable for analytics. That process was slow, expensive, and error-prone. With BDC, that’s all automated so organizations can focus their time and resources on building innovative AI models, automating insights, or improving business performance instead of just wrangling data.
Let’s take a practical scenario, imagine a large enterprise with data coming from ERP, HR, procurement, and expense systems. Traditionally, every system had its own data units, and teams had to spend weeks just preparing the data before running any kind of analysis. Now, with SAP Business Data Cloud, all of that data whether it’s from SAP S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, or even non-SAP systems can be harmonized and made available in one place instantly. That gives the business a 360-degree view across operations, employees, customers, and suppliers. The platform supports a wide range of use cases from data warehousing and BI, to AI and machine learning, planning, governance, and even intelligent application development. Basically, it’s an end-to-end solution that connects data and intelligence across the entire organization. The real value, however, is in the trust and governance that come built-in. Because BDC leverages SAP’s domain expertise and semantic understanding of business data, it ensures that what you see in your reports and AI models actually reflects reality not inconsistent or duplicate information.
So to sum it up, SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) transforms how organizations manage and use their data. It addresses the three biggest challenges of the data-driven world:
Building a single, reliable foundation for AI and analytics Ensuring data trust and quality Unlocking the full value of structured and unstructured data across the enterprise
It’s like a bridge that connects all the data sources, both internal and external into one governed, business-ready environment. In other words, it takes us from data chaos to clarity. It helps organizations move beyond just having data, to truly using it to drive growth, innovation, and intelligent decision-making.
Key Components of SAP Business Data Cloud
Let’s see how BDC is built and how the key components that make it work and how they fit together.
One of the most interesting things about SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is that it doesn’t start from scratch. It combines some of SAP’s most proven existing technologies with brand new innovations designed for the data and AI era.
Let’s understand the existing SAP solutions that form the foundation.
SAP Datasphere – This is one of the core data integration and modeling layer of BDC. It is like a brain that organises, connects, and models all the business data. Datasphere allows you to define data models, map relationships, and create semantic layers that business and technical users can both understand. It’s the part of the platform that ensures data is structured, contextualized, and ready to use for analytics and AI.
SAP Analytics Cloud – This is the analysis and visualization layer. It’s where users actually interact with data through dashboards, reports, and planning models. SAC is tightly integrated with BDC. It provides both out-of-the-box analytical stories and flexible tools for ad-hoc analysis. It even supports AI-driven features like predictive insights and chat-based data exploration, helping users move seamlessly from insight to action.
SAP BW or BW/4HANA – Many customers already have large investments in BW, and SAP recognized that value. So instead of replacing it, BDC integrates it. BW data objects can be technically onboarded into the Business Data Cloud, as data products and reuse them in new AI and analytics scenarios. SAP plans to support BW until 2030, but the idea is to give customers a smooth modernization path toward BW/4HANA and cloud-native analytics.
Now let’s understand the new components introduced specifically for SAP Business Data Cloud.
SAP Databricks – This is one of the biggest innovations. It brings advanced AI and machine learning capabilities directly into the SAP ecosystem. Databricks has long been a leader in large-scale data processing and pro-code data science, and SAP has now embedded a tailored version inside BDC.
This integration allows data scientists to access and extend data products directly. For example, they can take a data product from SAP Business Data Cloud, enrich it with machine learning models in Databricks, and then push the enhanced insights right back into the BDC catalog or vice versa.
SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation Services – This layer manages the data lifecycle from ingestion and harmonization to transformation and enrichment. When data comes from your source systems (for example, SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP SuccessFactors) the Foundation Services replicate it into the BDC environment, which runs on SAP HANA Cloud and hyper-scaler infrastructure. From there, it’s automatically cleansed, harmonized, and turned into something called a data product which a packaged, ready-to-use set of business data.
Conclusion
Now we have covered the Introduction, Why do we need Business Data Cloud, and Key Components of SAP Business Data Cloud. I hope you have got a basic understanding about SAP Business Data Cloud. This is the first part of the blog series.
In the upcoming parts, we will cover the architecture of SAP Business Data Cloud, and understand the main components of BDC in detail.
If you have any questions or queries, please post them as comments. I will try to answer the maximum as per my knowledge.
IntroductionLet’s understand what is SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is a unified data platform which means a single environment that harmonizes information from all SAP and non-SAP sources into a trusted semantic layer. BDC can be the organization’s single source of truth which provides a consistent, governed layer of data that everyone can use, whether it’s for analytics, planning, or building AI Applications. But the bigger topic is why do we even need something like SAP Business Data Cloud?Why do we need Business Data Cloud? Today every organization is talking about being ‘data-driven.’ We all want to make decisions based on real insights rather than gut feeling. But in reality, its not that easy. the truth is data is everywhere. But it’s rarely in one place or in one consistent format. Businesses have information scattered across multiple systems . Like some in SAP applications like S/4HANA or SuccessFactors, some in non-SAP platforms, spreadsheets, or even external sources like partners and IoT devices. So when companies try to bring that data together for analytics or AI, they face a few very real challenges. How do you build a single, complete data foundation that supports modern AI and machine learning models? How do you trust your data? how do you ensure quality, consistency, and integrity so that the decisions you make are actually reliable? How do you extract real business value from this massive, mixed pool of structured and unstructured data?SAP recognized that these are the exact pain points stopping companies from truly using data to their advantage. And that’s what led to the creation of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC).One of the major innovations behind BDC is how it eliminates data fragmentation. Instead of moving data between systems and losing context along the way, BDC integrates data in real time while preserving its business meaning. For example, if the same business entity, say a customer exists in multiple SAP systems, BDC brings together under a unified definition using the One Domain Model. So business users don’t have to worry about where the data came from or how it’s structured. They simply work with consistent, harmonized business entities that are ready for analytics, reporting, or Artificial Intelligence (AI). The best part is SAP fully manages the entire lifecycle. BDC is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service solution built on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). Because of that all the integration, replication, and governance are handled by SAP. In the past, customers had to manually extract and prepare SAP data before it was usable for analytics. That process was slow, expensive, and error-prone. With BDC, that’s all automated so organizations can focus their time and resources on building innovative AI models, automating insights, or improving business performance instead of just wrangling data.Let’s take a practical scenario, imagine a large enterprise with data coming from ERP, HR, procurement, and expense systems. Traditionally, every system had its own data units, and teams had to spend weeks just preparing the data before running any kind of analysis. Now, with SAP Business Data Cloud, all of that data whether it’s from SAP S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur, or even non-SAP systems can be harmonized and made available in one place instantly. That gives the business a 360-degree view across operations, employees, customers, and suppliers. The platform supports a wide range of use cases from data warehousing and BI, to AI and machine learning, planning, governance, and even intelligent application development. Basically, it’s an end-to-end solution that connects data and intelligence across the entire organization. The real value, however, is in the trust and governance that come built-in. Because BDC leverages SAP’s domain expertise and semantic understanding of business data, it ensures that what you see in your reports and AI models actually reflects reality not inconsistent or duplicate information.So to sum it up, SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) transforms how organizations manage and use their data. It addresses the three biggest challenges of the data-driven world: Building a single, reliable foundation for AI and analytics Ensuring data trust and quality Unlocking the full value of structured and unstructured data across the enterpriseIt’s like a bridge that connects all the data sources, both internal and external into one governed, business-ready environment. In other words, it takes us from data chaos to clarity. It helps organizations move beyond just having data, to truly using it to drive growth, innovation, and intelligent decision-making.Key Components of SAP Business Data CloudLet’s see how BDC is built and how the key components that make it work and how they fit together.One of the most interesting things about SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is that it doesn’t start from scratch. It combines some of SAP’s most proven existing technologies with brand new innovations designed for the data and AI era.Let’s understand the existing SAP solutions that form the foundation. SAP Datasphere – This is one of the core data integration and modeling layer of BDC. It is like a brain that organises, connects, and models all the business data. Datasphere allows you to define data models, map relationships, and create semantic layers that business and technical users can both understand. It’s the part of the platform that ensures data is structured, contextualized, and ready to use for analytics and AI.SAP Analytics Cloud – This is the analysis and visualization layer. It’s where users actually interact with data through dashboards, reports, and planning models. SAC is tightly integrated with BDC. It provides both out-of-the-box analytical stories and flexible tools for ad-hoc analysis. It even supports AI-driven features like predictive insights and chat-based data exploration, helping users move seamlessly from insight to action.SAP BW or BW/4HANA – Many customers already have large investments in BW, and SAP recognized that value. So instead of replacing it, BDC integrates it. BW data objects can be technically onboarded into the Business Data Cloud, as data products and reuse them in new AI and analytics scenarios. SAP plans to support BW until 2030, but the idea is to give customers a smooth modernization path toward BW/4HANA and cloud-native analytics.Now let’s understand the new components introduced specifically for SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Databricks – This is one of the biggest innovations. It brings advanced AI and machine learning capabilities directly into the SAP ecosystem. Databricks has long been a leader in large-scale data processing and pro-code data science, and SAP has now embedded a tailored version inside BDC.This integration allows data scientists to access and extend data products directly. For example, they can take a data product from SAP Business Data Cloud, enrich it with machine learning models in Databricks, and then push the enhanced insights right back into the BDC catalog or vice versa.SAP Business Data Cloud Foundation Services – This layer manages the data lifecycle from ingestion and harmonization to transformation and enrichment. When data comes from your source systems (for example, SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP SuccessFactors) the Foundation Services replicate it into the BDC environment, which runs on SAP HANA Cloud and hyper-scaler infrastructure. From there, it’s automatically cleansed, harmonized, and turned into something called a data product which a packaged, ready-to-use set of business data.ConclusionNow we have covered the Introduction, Why do we need Business Data Cloud, and Key Components of SAP Business Data Cloud. I hope you have got a basic understanding about SAP Business Data Cloud. This is the first part of the blog series.In the upcoming parts, we will cover the architecture of SAP Business Data Cloud, and understand the main components of BDC in detail.If you have any questions or queries, please post them as comments. I will try to answer the maximum as per my knowledge. Read More Technology Blog Posts by Members articles
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