SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC)

SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is the cornerstone of a modern enterprise data strategy.

It brings together the best of SAP and partner technologies to harmonize, govern, and activate your data for analytics and AI. 

At its core, BDC focuses on building unified, business-ready data layers that support analytics and AI, creating a strong foundation for data-driven decision-making. SAP BDC main services:

Data and Semantic Layer

Object Store​

A cloud-native storage layer within SAP Business Data Cloud that persists large volumes of structured and unstructured data in a cost-optimized way while keeping it accessible as governed “data products” for analytics and AI scenarios. It separates storage from compute, enabling scalable data management and helping organizations unify SAP and non-SAP data on a flexible, governed foundation. This makes it easier to support consistent analytics, reporting, and AI use cases while creating a future-ready data architecture.

 
 

SAP Datasphere​

Provides the semantic data fabric that integrates SAP and non-SAP sources, ensuring governed access, modeling, and transformation.

SAP BW PCE

Offers a seamless path to modernize legacy BW investments in a cloud-native environment while preserving business logic and accelerating innovation.

Data Products​

Deliver reusable, domain-specific datasets with consistent semantics, designed to speed up analytics and AI adoption.

SAP Databricks​

Expands BDC with large-scale data engineering, data science and machine learning, including zero-copy integration for advanced workloads.

SAP HANA Cloud

SAP HANA Cloud is the cloud-native database foundation of SAP. It provides a unified in-memory and disk-based data platform for transactional (OLTP), analytical (OLAP), and hybrid workloads.

Core advantages:

  • Real-time processing of large datasets
  • Virtualization and federation of SAP and non-SAP data
  • Multi-model capabilities (graph, spatial, document, relational)
  • High scalability and elastic compute/storage

HANA Cloud is the engine behind modern SAP data architectures and a core pillar for data-driven applications.

SAP Snowflake​

Enables seamless data federation and analytics across SAP and Snowflake environments, allowing organizations to combine governed SAP data with cloud-native analytics at scale – without unnecessary data duplication.

Analytics, BI and Planning

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC)

Turns harmonized data into interactive dashboards, advanced planning models, and AI-driven insights.

Intelligent Apps

Combine data products, semantic models, and ready-to-use dashboards into packaged solutions that deliver immediate business value.

AI and ML

Joule

A generative AI copilot that lets business users interact with governed BDC data and apps through natural language, triggering AI agents to execute tasks, surface insights, and automate workflows across SAP and non-SAP systems.

AI Foundation

A unified layer of AI services and tooling that operationalizes machine learning, generative AI, and AI agents directly on top of governed, semantically rich business data, so models can reason with full business context and lineage. It provides lifecycle management for AI models and agents.

 

Each of these components plays a distinct role within the SAP BDC ecosystem – supporting data harmonization, analytics, AI enablement, and modernization across the enterprise.

Together, these capabilities form a scalable, AI-ready platform that unifies enterprise data, protects existing investments, and accelerates the journey to intelligent decision-making.