A new data platform
The most important takeaway of the new solution is that a big part of BDC is SAP Databricks; a component within BDC that offers customer AI, Machine Learning and pro-code engineering functionalities managed by Databricks’ Unity Catalog (that they also use in their proprietary Data Lakehouse offering). SAP Databricks is an SAP-tailored version of Databricks that does not include the full Databricks architecture. Note that it must also be activated as a separate component within BDC and is a compute engine only; one that does not come with any specific Data Storage.
SAP Databricks can, in turn, connect to SAP Data Products. SAP Data Products are also newly introduced with the release of BDC. Data Products exist as Delta Lake Tables that include their respective business semantics, finetuned for use in a variety of contexts, from data warehousing to AI model training. These Data Products can be directly consumed by SAP Databricks through a ‘zero-copy’ approach (federation). Moreover, if you use the Insight Apps (Business Content) that SAP delivers with BDC, you can directly use these Data Products without further replication. Only in cases where you build your own data models and alter or enhance the standard Data Products in a Custom managed space, you will still need to replicate the data to SAP Datasphere. SAP’s long-term roadmap states that they will also allow the federated use of Data products in these Custom Managed Spaces as well in SAP Databricks. However, having the option to share delta directly from Delta Tables without replication offers a great way to integrate SAP datasets with Databricks. This also means that the Premium Outbound functionality (in SAP Datasphere) via replication flows is no longer required if you work with Databricks.
The future SAP portfolio
So, what about SAP customers? Existing customers that use SAP Datasphere or SAP Analytics Cloud will be able to add the Business Data Cloud Cockpit as an additional service on their BTP environment. They can create a ‘so-called’ formation which includes all three systems (SAC, Datasphere and BDC), provided that they use the same tenant. Linking the systems and jumping from one to another offers a seamless, integrated experience to users. This means SAP Datasphere’s native capabilities remain, with pre-built analytical applications based on SAP data models and the additional option to extend these via the SAP Databricks component. Combine this knowledge with the integration with SAP Analytics Cloud, which includes dashboarding and (financial) planning, and we can safely say that BDC will indeed be the next step in the integration between SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud as a unified solution.
Another important note is that SAP BW objects will be accessible as data products in BDC if you use the SAP BW 7.5 Private Cloud Edition or the SAP BW/4HANA Private Cloud Edition, allowing these to be leveraged for data and AI purposes as well (where before, this would only have been possible after integrating this data in Datasphere itself). Customers that make the move to an SAP BW 7.5 Cloud Edition will benefit from an extended support period, with end-of-life being 2030 as opposed to 2027, giving them more time to fully realize a migration towards BDC.
AI
Of course, no product presentation would be complete without Artificial Intelligence. Joule (SAP’s AI Agent) is front-and-center in BDC, supported by knowledge graph to connect (meta)data and semantics for use in Large Language Models. In practice, this means that both Joule and LLMs of your choice can be trained on a unified data model (as opposed to several scattered versions of the truth).
A strength we see here is the option to combine data (lineage) from SAP AI partners such as Confluent, DataRobot and, most important in our view, Collibra with its class-leading Data Intelligence platform. Finally, SAP also announced new partnerships with Accenture, DataRobot, McKinsey, EY, PWC, Deloitte, and Capgemini, who will provide apps built on top of the data products within BDC. We have seen similar moves before within Datasphere’s Marketplace, moves that failed to make a large impact on Datasphere’s value proposition at customers, so we will be monitoring how useful these new partner apps will be(come).
SAP’s Business Data Cloud is a brand new solution of which SAP states has been in the works for years. It combines familiar functionalities we know from Datasphere and SAC with exciting new capabilities from Databricks. As more specifics about the solution are revealed, and we as Expertum get more information and experience with it, we will of course update this blog to reflect the latest. We will look into:
- Pricing (credits).
- Availability timelines.
If you want to know if BDC could be a new opportunity for your data landscape, whether you are a BW, SAC or Datasphere customer, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Credits
This blog was written by our experts Lars van der Goes, Dick Groenhof and Rogier Schipper.
About the author
Lars van der Goes is SAP Data & Analytics Lead at Expertum. Lars combines strong functional skills with broad knowledge of Analytics principles, products and possibilities.
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