The 13th of February 2025 SAP organized an Online event to present SAP Business Data Cloud
I have the impression that there was an exaggerated expectation around this event in the last few days, and that there were people who expected a super announcement from SAP. Personally, I did not believe that they were going to announce SAP S/5 or something like that, so I do not feel disappointed at all with the presentation. However, for me, as with everything, there are many lights and many shadows, let’s break them down little by little.
Some of the SAP Gurus, or maybe in this case not acting as guru but more like intelligent people, spotted that the SAP Business Unleashed event was to present the new branding of the actual SAP Datasphere, with some new features. The trick was simple, they just read the agenda of the future meetings. (I read that thing from Antonio De Ancos post)
Hours before the SAP Business Unleashed we were able to see in LinkedIn some other announcements that were in the same direction, and both SAP and Databricks reveal that they do a partnership and Databricks will be part of SAP Business Data Cloud, the new name for SAP Datasphere.
For the ones that are not familiar with Databricks, basically is a Could-Based analytics platform that is designed to manage big data and machine learning workflows. One of the particular use I see fitting inside of SAP Business Data Cloud its the ETL feature using the power of Extraction and Transformation that it has.
The Databricks inclusion will increase the capabilities of extraction data from Non-SAP systems.
I think that this are very good news for the SAP Data ecosystem that with Databricks the SAP dataset will not forget about legacy systems that have necessary inputs to drive data decisions.
SAP also presented some out-of-the-box packages like the one for working capital that includes all the reporting already generated combined with the AI experience of Jule.
But this was not the only topic of the event, of course SAP Joule AI was a very important part of it.
With all the data, we need to do something and for that scenario SAP believes that Joule AI will have all the answers to data driven decisions. The good news its that SAP open for custom build development of Joule Agents, and this is a good news because in a fast changing word, nobody knows which agents will be the ones that will perform better, there are no winners yet.
One AI strategy that I didn’t like from SAP was the closure to the rest of the world AI ecosystem, while with other solutions we do have 20K agents available with SAP we were fully dependent on what they decide to develop. I believe this is a good step to open and standardize SAP AI strategy.
What its unbeatable its that in actual enterprises SAP has the Data, so their philosophy of Suite-First approach + use of SAP Knowledge Graph + the open Agent Builder strategy seems a great and secure strategy to do the first steps in the AI.
In this conference there were almost no mention to the “old” BW, and how to draw a migration path to SAP Business Data Cloud, I feel that will be only 2 possible paths, wither via SAP BW Bridge for the existing developments, or refactoring all to take all the advantages of the new features but with a high implementation cost..
As as summary I think that SAP did a very smart movement with this alliance because they really need to push the BTP Data tools as they were far behind from their competitors. If you can not defeat them, join them.
I am sure we will hear more cases and success stories in the near future of SAP Business AI (Joule) + SAP Business Suite + SAP Business Data Cloud.
Will SAP BDC be the solution for the new data requirements 😉
Welcome to the new era of the Batch Inputs in front of us many years and we didn’t realize it.
