SAP & Databricks Power New Era of Business Data and AI
Data is the very bedrock for most, if not all, modern enterprises, the cornerstone of digital transformation and the driving force behind AI. SAP, drawing on its five decades of experience in running mission-critical processes across every industry, has witnessed first hand the transformative power of business data.
SAP's newly-unveiled Business Data Cloud, a fully-managed SaaS solution, has the potential to unify and govern all SAP data and seamlessly connect with third-party data.
Working as the next step of its industry-leading data, planning and analytics solutions, SAP Business Data Cloud brings together SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Business Warehouse with a unified experience that delivers transformational insights across all lines of business.
It comes as SAP and Databricks announce a landmark partnership to bring the power of Databricks into SAP Business Data Cloud – marking a new era in enterprise data management, with the two leaders in their domains coming together to redefine how applications and data platforms work together.
Insights driving transformation
Many businesses are still wrestling over data they cannot trust, creating a barrier to true innovation in data and AI.
SAP's The trust factor: Data, resilience, and innovation survey, which spoke to leaders from around 1,200 business and technology leaders, uncovered that 55% cite poor data quality as their biggest challenge – and nearly half of these leaders pointed to the difficulty of harmonising data across ecosystems as a key reason that innovation stalls.
The Business Data Cloud will look to bridge this gap. Through its trusted and harmonised data foundation, it will empower IT and business leaders with the full context of the business, helping to drive more impactful decisions.
SAP Business Data Cloud delivers fully managed SAP data products across all business processes. These curated data products align to a highly optimised and unified "one domain model," maintaining their original business context and semantics, which means getting immediate access to high-quality data which can be trusted.
As the data products are fully managed by SAP, businesses no longer have to bear the hidden costs of rebuilding and maintaining data extracts. With the SaaS experience providing a simplified life cycle management, ensuring data consistency and enables zero-copy sharing across the data and analytics ecosystem.
Through its suite of pre-built analytical applications, the SAP Business Data Cloud helps to find hidden insights and fast-track the decision making. These "insight apps" are fully managed and incorporate pre-defined metrics, AI models and planning capabilities, simplifying how businesses connect and integrate every part of the business.
This will enhance the speed of use cases aligned with the most vital business functions, which include ERP, spend, supply chain, HR, customer experience and finance.
As every business needs a pulse on its most vital resources, with the insight apps, organisations can harness preconfigured packages already connected to the business data, such as working capital, to gain a 360-degree view of the organisation's financial health with real-time visibility into cash flow and profitability.
“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 organizations do more with their data than ever before.”
Connecting all the data
The data cloud works as a hub, connecting all the data through leveraging business data fabric principles – making it easier to discover, share, govern and model the data. It includes SAP Databricks as a first-party data service, bringing the power of Databricks directly in SAP Business Data Cloud.
“Every company on the planet wants to get more value out of their data and greater returns on their AI investments,” adds Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO of Databricks.
“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 on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.”
Key features of SAP Business Data Cloud include:
Business semantics: Use SAP Datasphere to discover, share and model the same trusted data across existing platforms without costly data extraction. Build a powerful knowledge graph of all data, preserving its business metadata and semantics, so data is easily searchable and actionable. For existing SAP Datasphere customers, the investments remain fully supported — with no disruptions — and all SAP Datasphere capabilities will natively be available in SAP Business Data Cloud.
Data engineering and machine learning/AI: SAP Databricks empowers every data professional to accelerate AI models and generative AI apps on their business data. Native capabilities like Delta Sharing harmonise SAP data products with existing lakehouses bi-directionally. By integrating all the data with a zero-copy approach, organisations can apply advanced AI and machine learning models to finance use cases, like predicting the payment date on open receivables.
SAP Business Warehouse modernisation: SAP Business Data Cloud gives on-premise SAP Business Warehouse customers a flexible path to the cloud. With native integration to SAP Business Warehouse, easily access the data as a data product with the object store via Delta Share — simplifying the modernisation journey and maximising SAP's Business Warehouse investment.
Analytics and planning: SAP Business Data Cloud brings analytics and planning together in one solution, enabling organisations to go from insights to actions instantly. Automate reporting, simulate possible business outcomes with AI and unify financial, supply chain and operational planning — all in a connected view.
Markus Hartmann, Corporate Vice President and Head of Business Technology at Henkel, says: "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 connect and enhance our existing data products, ensuring long-term adaptability.
"Trusted, business-ready data will empower users to model scenarios and leverage AI insights, building a sustainable and flexible future for our data ecosystems."
Foster reliable AI
As generative AI continues its rapid growth, organisations now need to first have the right data foundation. SAP Business Data Cloud brings all the data to ensure Gen AI is built on accurate, trusted data with business context.
Joule, SAP's Gen AI copilot, is deeply integrated with SAP Business Data Cloud. The knowledge graph in SAP Business Data Cloud connects the data, metadata and business processes, enabling AI agents, Joule and large language models (LLMs) to understand specific data within the context of its relationships.
This mapping creates clear data links, making insights more reliable for users and applications. Training AI agents and Joule on business knowledge and context drives increased productivity. Users can use AI to complete cross-functional tasks, uncover insights and summarise critical information across the business — without heavy reliance on IT support. This empowers the usage of AI to automate complex analytics and planning tasks, such as risk assessment, forecasting and other advanced scenario simulations.
SAP Business Data Cloud ecosystem
At its core, SAP Business Data Cloud is built to prioritise openness and customer choice.
To simplify the data landscape, SAP Business Data Cloud supports an open data ecosystem. It integrates natively with leading data and AI partners like Collibra, Confluent and DataRobot. And it doesn't stop there; SAP plans to announce new strategic partnerships in the coming weeks and months to further expand the open data ecosystem.
Supported by its large partner ecosystem, SAP has made it easier to unleash transformative insights from all the data. The company has partners with deep business process and industry domain expertise that are building insight apps on SAP Business Data Cloud.
From data enrichment to data activation, partner insight apps build on top of the data products and the core services that SAP Business Data Cloud provides. SAP has announced its first partner apps with Accenture, DataRobot, Spendscape by McKinsey, PwC, EY, Deloitte and Capgemini.
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