Technology become Easy just call us
Technology become Easy just call us
15 Feb, 2025
SAP has announced a partnership with Databricks to launch SAP Business Data Cloud, a data management platform that integrates enterprise data across applications to support AI development.
Announced at the company’s Business Unleashed event, SAP Business Data Cloud integrates data from both SAP and external applications, providing organisations with capabilities to manage data engineering and analytics. The platform embeds Databricks technology for data engineering, machine learning and AI workloads.
According to SAP, companies report difficulties in implementing AI projects at scale, with integration challenges between data sources and concerns about data quality preventing firms from realising returns on AI investments. These implementation hurdles have shaped the development of Business Data Cloud.
Muhammad Alam, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, says: “Our customers are telling us that they're struggling to implement and realise the value of AI in their organisations. It’s hard to get reliable, high-quality datasets across the enterprise to power this AI. Many have done hundreds of proof of concepts but have not been able to get them to production effectively.”
The platform creates data products from SAP applications including S/4HANA, Ariba and SuccessFactors, maintaining business context from source systems. This approach enables organisations to access data without extraction processes.
For financial analysis, the platform can combine external data sources with internal financial records. A chief financial officer can, for example, analyse inflation impacts on profitability by connecting consumer price indices with general ledger accounts and cost centre data.
Muhammad says: “Unless this data is harmonised across business processes, managed and governed across your business, its value materially decreases. Customers spend millions of dollars trying to bring this data together in a way that harmonises the data model with some level of governance and quality, but that’s very hard to do.”
The partnership focuses on connecting enterprise applications with data platform capabilities. Muhammad says: “With SAP and Databricks, you get the world's most important dataset with the world’s leading data platform company – there’s no simpler way to put it.”
Christian Klein, SAP CEO says: “SAP Business Data Cloud unleashes the full value of enterprise data for Business AI. 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 organisations do more with their data than ever before.”
The platform enhances SAP's Joule generative AI assistant through access to enterprise data and the SAP Knowledge Graph solution. This enables Joule to manage workflows across business functions.
SAP has released Joule agents for finance and sales departments. Finance agents process claims and manage cash flow, while sales agents handle customer disputes and enquiries. The company plans to extend these capabilities across its Business Suite applications.
SAP’s announcement at Business Unleashed also includes a new agent builder tool for customers to develop AI agents, which incorporates SAP's process expertise into guided workflows, enabling users to connect agents with enterprise data sources.
These custom agents can operate alongside SAP’s pre-built Joule agents, allowing organisations to extend the platform's capabilities to specific business requirements.
The partnership between SAP and Databricks addresses growing demand from organisations seeking to implement AI capabilities while maintaining control over their data assets. SAP’s approach emphasises flexible integration with existing enterprise systems.
With SAP and Databricks, you get the world's most important dataset with the world's leading data platform company - there's no simpler way to put it.
Muhammad says: “We’re doing all of this with the principle of openness. In the data space, we want to offer SAP data in a managed, governed, and open way where customers can, through zero-copy share, bring that together with any investments they may have made.”
The platform enables organisations without existing data infrastructure to implement AI capabilities. Muhammad says: “We also know there are many customers that haven't made a data platform decision, so SAP Business Data Cloud allows you to not just have the SAP data, but bring in non-SAP data and, with the power of the tooling and SAP Databricks, create insights and apply AI.”
As Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks, says: “Every company on the planet wants to get more value out of their data and greater returns on their AI investments. By joining forces with SAP, we're helping organisations 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.”
