SAP Business Data – What is it and why should I care | Part 1

SAP Business Data Cloud was launched (to much fanfare and excitement) on the 13th Feb at a highly publicised launch (see launch blog here). As the NTT Data and Analytics Practice director, I’ve followed this launch and all subsequent reveals very closely. A few things have struck me: 

1. This is a significant product launch for SAP, much more so than SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and Datapshere were, imo. This is not just a product tweak or rebranding (more to come on this and the reason for this blog series) 
2. For the first time in my career in the SAP D&A ecosystem (spanning over 27 years so far), SAP is placing Data at the heart of its strategy. If anyone has seen the new version of SAP Business Suite strategy (diagram below), you will see that this is not about ERP alone – forget the old meaning of Business Suite – but rather a data and AI-led strategy where the ERP and other LoB apps are more about generating the much-valued data, than about optimised or integrated business processes! Is SAP becoming a data company?? 

SAP Business Data Cloud positioning within the Business Suite

From my introduction, you can probably tell that data and specifically SAP Business Data Cloud is a big deal as far as I am concerned and as far as SAP’s strategy goes. So, I thought I’d write a 2 or 3-part blog series explaining why I feel this way and what SAP BDC brings to our customers, which was not possible prior to 13^th Feb.

In this first blog, I am not going to lift the kimono on BDC yet 😊 you’ll have to read part 2, but rather I am going to start by answering a few key questions describing the state of the customer and SAP D&A market. This will help us understand SAP BDC’s true value proposition.

1. What are the customers’ Data and Analytics Goal(s)?

I am going to be controversial and not say AI! 😊

Despite the allure and popularity of AI, many customers are still in the WALK phase of their D&A journey (when you consider a CRAWL, WALK, RUN continuum).  More precisely, the modern organisation wants everyone to be data-driven, from executives to senior managers to LoB leaders to analysts to back office and front office staff. This is the modern version of self-service analytics – something companies have been striving to achieve for ages! The key difference from self-service BI of yesteryear is the very broad spectrum of personas, each with very different data velocity,  processing and consumption needs and styles.

2. What technology challenges are companies facing in achieving this goal of being data-driven?

Most organisations recognise that their legacy investments in D&A capability will not cover all these personas and needs. Why?

Larger varieties and volumes of data, varied data processing and consumption needs, along with intuitive data governance, mean their current investments are lacking in many areas.

These aging platforms, typically comprised of multiple different customer-managed applications all chained together, were fit for purpose 10 years ago, but no longer offer the user experience, capabilities, agility and cost effectiveness of the best-in-class modern data platforms.

3. Whilst SAP has made progress in the last few years addressing some of these challenges, there are still some gaps in their offerings (think BW/4HANA, HANA Cloud, Datasphere and SAC). So, what were the remaining gaps in SAP’s D&A portfolio till recently?

 I am going to classify the challenges into 3 categories i.e. architecture, persona coverage and data accessibility.

Architecture Challenge #1 – Data Lake

Most organisations picking a modern data platform will look for a scalable, agile and cost-effective data storage for all volumes and varieties of data, aka a Data Lake.

It is present on all the leading data platforms but absent in SAP Datasphere. This is largely due to the fact that under the bonnet, SAP Datasphere is based on HANA, which is an in-memory DB. An object store has never been a core part of SAP Datapshere¹

Architecture Challenge #2 – Architectural choice

D&A design patterns and principles are being challenged constantly. Nothing is static. There are Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, Data Lakehouses, Data Fabrics and Data Meshes. Organisations want the freedom to choose their approach freely and evolve over time, without having to buy more software or worse, re-platform.

Because of architectural challenge #1, the SAP D&A suite (including SAC, HANA Cloud and SAP Datasphere, and even BW/4HANA) could not support all these different architectural paradigms.

Persona coverage challenge

The self-service user spectrum is broader than ever.

Sure, execs and managers have IT-delivered or self-service dashboards in SAC, including natural language questioning. Power users can wrangle data in SAP Datasphere and create ad-hoc analytics using SAC or Embedded Analytics in S/4.

However, professional and citizen data scientists lack easy access to the latest libraries and AI models in SAP D&A tools, requiring branching out to BTP and involving developers.

Data engineers and ML engineers, who prefer coding in notebooks with languages like Python and SCALA, also find SAP Datasphere lacking in development experience and language access.

SAP Data Accessibility challenge

SAP ERP and other LoB apps are sophisticated (best-in-class in fact) but complex, posing data accessibility challenges. Even skilled Data Engineering teams struggle with SAP ERP data models, finding essential data among thousands, and integrating them meaningfully in a manner that makes sense to the very broad user spectrum we’ve spoken about. Then, understanding the nuances of extracting data from SuccessFactors Learning vs Employee Central…why should these even be different??

In summary, the main challenge for customers is finding, understanding, extracting, and modelling SAP application data cost-effectively and reusably. Despite the existence of SAC and SAP Datasphere content, coverage has been patchy, deployment complicated, and spread across multiple tools.”

A new hope! (cue Star Wars tune😊)

I hope all this doesn’t come across as a bit negative. There is a lot to love about SAP Datapshere and SAC – we’ve delivered some awesome solutions using these technologies, but we have to be honest about where we were a few months ago when our clients were looking for a truly enterprise-wide modern data platform.

As you might be anticipating, the “tada” moment is coming in the next blog where I’ll explain the top 3 things that SAP has done with the advent of SAP Business Data Cloud to meet their competitors and crucially move the game ahead of them! Stay tuned.

¹ The object store was added to SAP Datapshere in December 2024, but was really an early foreshadowing of SAP BDC to come 2 months later

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