AWS re:Invent 2025 - Next-Gen Analytics & AI with SAP Business Data Cloud on AWS (AIM108)

AWS re:Invent 2025 - Next-Gen Analytics & AI with SAP Business Data Cloud on AWS

Overview of SAP Business Data Cloud

• SAP Business Data Cloud is a relatively new offering from SAP, announced about 7 months ago
• It brings together existing SAP solutions like SAP Data Sphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse under a unified platform
• The key goals are to:
  • Enable embedded AI within SAP's transactional applications
  • Provide a modern lakehouse architecture for SAP data
  • Deliver out-of-the-box data products and intelligent applications

Challenges with Traditional SAP Data Integration

• Customers have historically extracted SAP data into data lakes and lakehouses using third-party solutions
• This process is complex, requiring technical expertise to rebuild the SAP data model and manage data pipelines
• It also results in multiple copies of SAP data across the enterprise

Key Features of SAP Business Data Cloud

1. Data Products:

   • SAP-curated data products that provide a complete, semantically-rich view of SAP data
   • Eliminates the need to extract, transform, and load SAP data
   • Enables zero-copy data sharing with partners like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and Microsoft Azure

2. Intelligent Applications:

   • SAP-delivered and partner-built applications that leverage the data products
   • Cater to different personas and business functions (e.g., finance, supply chain, HR)
   • Combine SAP and non-SAP data to provide comprehensive insights

3. Unified Data Platform:

   • Includes components like SAP Data Sphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and optional SAP Databricks and SAP Snowflake instances
   • Provides a central, governed data layer for analytics, AI, and planning

4. Knowledge Graph:

   • Leverages the SAP data model to enable natural language querying of SAP data
   • Improves the ability of AI and large language models to understand and extract insights from SAP data

5. Integrations and Partnerships:

   • Allows seamless data sharing and collaboration with enterprise data platforms like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and Microsoft Azure
   • Enables bi-directional data flow between SAP Business Data Cloud and external systems

Business Benefits and Use Cases

• Reduces time and cost of SAP data integration by up to 80%
• Enables embedded AI within SAP transactional applications
• Accelerates data-driven decision-making with out-of-the-box intelligent applications
• Supports a wide range of personas and business functions
• Facilitates cross-domain data products and applications
• Modernizes existing SAP Business Warehouse deployments

Technical Details and Roadmap

• SAP plans to expand the number of data products from 239 currently to over 400 by the end of 2023
• Upcoming enhancements include:
  • Data product studio for easier custom data product creation
  • Deeper integrations with partners like AWS, Microsoft, and Google
  • Semantic onboarding capabilities for SAP Business Warehouse
  • Release of the SAP Knowledge Graph and Conversational AI capabilities

Conclusion

SAP Business Data Cloud represents a significant evolution in how enterprises can leverage their SAP data for analytics, AI, and business decision-making. By providing a modern, governed data platform with out-of-the-box data products and intelligent applications, SAP is enabling customers to accelerate their digital transformation and unlock new business value from their SAP investments.