SAP has announced SAP Business Data Cloud, unifying all SAP and third-party data throughout an organisation and providing a trusted data foundation that harmonises data from organisations’ most mission-critical applications with data engineering and business analytics capabilities.
The partnership between SAP and Databricks marks a new era in enterprise data management as two leaders in their domains come together to redefine how applications and data platforms work together. The new solution natively embeds Databricks technology for data engineering, machine learning and AI workloads.
“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.”
“Every company on the planet wants to get more value out of their data and greater returns on their AI investments,” says Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “By joining forces with SAP, we’re helping organizations 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.”
SAP Business Data Cloud also helps SAP foster the growth of a data product economy. It delivers fully-managed SAP data products across all business processes – from finance, spend and supply chain data in SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ariba, to learning and talent data in SAP SuccessFactors. These data products maintain their original business context and semantics, providing immediate access to high-quality data without costly extraction processes. For example, if a CFO wants to assess the impact of rising inflation on profitability, SAP Business Data Cloud integrates real-time external data such as the consumer price index with financial data products such as general ledger accounts or cost centres to create a comprehensive financial snapshot.
SAP Business Data Cloud will also offer new capabilities called insight apps that use data products and AI models connected to real-time data to deliver advanced analytics and planning across all lines of business, including core enterprise analytics, finance and human resources.