The top 10 questions about SAP Business Data Cloud

In February 2025, SAP officially presented SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). The new solution combines modern data management with deep integration into SAP and non-SAP systems. As a consistent evolution of SAP’s previous strategy in the area of data and analytics, SAP BDC is designed as a comprehensive ecosystem – incorporating existing technologies and solutions such as SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and SAP Datasphere. The value proposition: optimized provision, management and use of data – also as a basis for analytical applications and AI use cases. In view of the numerous innovations that SAP Business Data Cloud brings with it, companies want to know how they can best exploit the potential of SAP BDC for their own requirements. We answer the top 10 questions about SAP Business Data Cloud.

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1. What is SAP Business Data Cloud?

SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is a software-as-a-service solution that consolidates, prepares and manages all data from SAP systems on a unified platform. SAP BDC also enables a seamless connection to non-SAP data. In this way, business data from all areas of a company is merged into a semantically rich data treasure, so that SAP BDC acts as a central hub for all business-critical data.

Strategically, SAP BDC represents the next evolutionary step in SAP’s Business Data Fabric journey, which began in 2023 with the release of SAP Datasphere, to meet the increased demands of companies in terms of data democratization. SAP BDC combines existing and new technologies to provide users with curated data products, advanced cross-domain analytics, benchmarking data and AI-powered insight apps.

Based on SAP Business Data Cloud, intelligent decisions can be made faster and business results can be optimized. Artificial intelligence, data and applications are combined in innovative ways so that companies can derive the greatest possible added value from their data. SAP BDC accelerates the path from data to decisions.

2. How is SAP Business Data Cloud being perceived by companies?

Based on the numerous discussions with companies that we support with our data & analytics expertise, we can see that the market response to SAP Business Data Cloud has been very positive. One key finding is that SAP BDC is an end-to-end solution that enables companies to generate immediate added value from their data. This means that companies that already use SAP Datasphere do not have to carry out a complex conversion project. Companies using SAP BW can become part of the formation with SAP BW Private Cloud Edition (PCE) or SAP BW/4HANA PCE. The provision of data while retaining semantics across system boundaries opens up new possibilities for companies in terms of data usage for analytics and for the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

3. What are the greatest benefits of SAP Business Data Cloud?

There are many different user (groups) in a company that rely on data in their daily work – from business users to data scientists. The key strength of SAP Business Data Cloud is that it manages to holistically map the respective requirements of the various users. SAP BDC thus makes a decisive contribution to data democratization and the establishment of data mesh concepts. In this way, it responds to the requirement of companies to make existing data accessible to a larger group of users, gain deeper insights into the data and use this as a basis for business decisions.

SAP Business Data Cloud combines existing services such as SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud with new components such as SAP Databricks and SAP BW PCE. With these components, companies are able to harmonize all business-critical data in an open data ecosystem and integrate it across existing data silos and data lakes. SAP BDC provides users with enriched data products, advanced analytics tools and AI applications.

You would like to know the answers to the remaining questions?

4. What role do data products play in SAP Business Data Cloud?
5. What is behind the term “Insight Apps”?
6. What can be said about the architecture of SAP Business Data Cloud?
7. What role does Databricks play in the context of SAP Business Data Cloud?
8. An SAP BW Private Cloud Edition (PCE) is also available as part of SAP BDC. What is it all about?
9. What changes does SAP Business Data Cloud bring?
10. What should companies that are currently on SAP BW 7.5 or SAP BW/4HANA do?