SAP has rolled out its Business Data Cloud platform, crafted in partnership with Databricks, to tackle one of the toughest challenges businesses face today: making sense of their scattered data. This new offering promises to bring together information locked away in various company systems, creating a solid foundation for better decision-making and more reliable AI applications.
Breaking Down Data Silos
The new platform tackles the age-old problem of disconnected information by blending data from core business applications with powerful engineering and analytics tools. Rather than forcing companies to extract and transform their data through complex processes, Business Data Cloud keeps the original business context intact.
“SAP Business Data Cloud unleashes the full value of enterprise data for Business AI,” says SAP CEO Christian Klein. “It combines SAP’s unique expertise in mission-critical, end-to-end processes and semantically rich data with Databricks’ world-class data engineering capabilities to create a ground-breaking solution that helps organisations do more with their data than ever before.”
This marriage between SAP’s deep business process knowledge and Databricks’ data expertise marks a significant shift in how companies can approach their information resources. Instead of treating applications and data platforms as separate worlds, the partnership brings them together in ways previously difficult to achieve.
Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi highlighted the practical benefits: “Every company on the planet wants to get more value out of their data and greater returns on their AI investments. By joining forces with SAP, we’re helping organisations bring together all their data — regardless of format or where it lives — to govern, analyse and build domain-specific AI applications.”
Introducing “Data Products” for Immediate Business Value
At the heart of Business Data Cloud is a fresh approach SAP calls the “data product economy.” The platform packages information from across business functions – financial data from S/4HANA, procurement information from Ariba, employee records from SuccessFactors – into ready-to-use data products that maintain their business meaning.
This approach solves a common headache: when data gets moved from its original system, it often loses important context. With data products, a CFO wanting to understand how inflation affects profitability can easily combine external economic indicators with internal financial records for a complete picture.
The platform will also feature “insight apps” that connect these data products with AI models and real-time information, delivering advanced analytics across various business areas.
Markus Hartmann from Henkel, a multinational consumer goods company, sees practical value in the approach: “SAP Business Data Cloud will help us unlock the value of our data and drive innovation across our business. Its semantically rich data products and deep Databricks integration will enhance our existing data products and empower us to model scenarios and leverage AI insights.”
Supercharging Joule: SAP’s AI Assistant Gets Smarter
The new platform significantly boosts what Joule, SAP’s AI assistant, can do. By giving Joule access to comprehensive business data and context through the SAP Knowledge Graph, the AI can now understand complex business processes and work across departments to solve problems – something SAP claims other AI systems can’t match without extensive customization.
SAP also announced several ready-to-use AI agents for specific business tasks:
- Finance agents that work together to handle claims faster and improve cash flow
- Sales agents that help resolve customer disputes and process inquiries more efficiently
- More specialized agents planned across other business functions
Perhaps most importantly, SAP unveiled a new tool that lets customers build their own AI agents alongside the pre-built ones. This agent builder incorporates SAP’s decades of business know-how into a guided process, ensuring that custom agents understand relevant business context.
What This Means for Businesses
For companies already using SAP systems, Business Data Cloud offers a way to leverage existing investments while adding AI capabilities without starting from scratch. Rather than building separate data lakes or warehouses disconnected from their operational systems, businesses can now create a more seamless flow between daily operations and advanced analytics.
As organizations continue their digital transformation journeys, platforms that connect operational data with analytics will become increasingly crucial for staying competitive and running efficiently. With Business Data Cloud, SAP positions itself as a bridge between traditional business applications and the AI-driven future of enterprise software.
