Dive Brief:
- SAP unveiled a cloud-based analytics and data engineering solution designed in partnership with Databricks Thursday. The SAP Business Data Cloud offering integrates SAP and third-party enterprise data to power machine learning, AI and agentic applications, the companies said.
- “This is a fully managed SaaS service to curate data from SAP applications that are on-prem as well as in the cloud,” Dan Yu, CMO of SAP Data & Analytics, told CIO Dive Monday. The platform includes off-the-shelf analytics tools, dashboards and AI capabilities.
- As part of the rollout, SAP expanded its AI portfolio with prebuilt agents for claims management, sales and customer service and deployed agent customization in the Joule Studio low-code/no-code developer environment.
Dive Insight:
As autonomous agents spread across the vendor landscape, SAP is banking on the rich stores of enterprise data that flow through its ERP software to draw customers to cloud. The analytics and AI solution announced Thursday is the latest migration enticement the company has added to its growing SaaS portfolio.
“There are tens of thousands of customers on-prem who need to migrate to the cloud,” Yu said, noting that many have decades of data already stored on SAP Business Warehouse. Existing customers can lift-and-shift workloads from on-prem data systems to cloud, where the data can help fuel SAP Business Data Cloud operations, he said.
The solution aims to ingest, integrate and extract value from data across enterprise functions and environments.
“Unless this data is harmonized across the business processes, managed and governed across your business, its value materially decreases,” Muhammad Alam, SAP executive board member and head of product engineering, said during a Wednesday virtual event. “Customers spend millions of dollars trying to bring this data together in a way that harmonizes the data model with some level of governance and quality.”
The new solution will gradually envelop SAP Datasphere, a cloud-based service introduced in 2023 and built into the SAP Business Technology Platform enterprise application suite, the company said. The change is part of a broader portfolio transformation that’s been underway for more than a year.
“Datasphere will evolve to being part of BDC, and BDC would be a vehicle for customers to use the capabilities that Datasphere has today,” Alam said.
SAP is releasing the cloud-based data solution on AWS, followed by Google Cloud and Azure. The first prebuilt applications, called Insight apps, target core enterprise analytics.
“We will initially have Insight apps for CIOs,” Yu said. Finance, human resources, supply chain and other line-of-business tools will follow.
In a move that harkens back to SAP’s on-prem past, SAP Business Technology Platform and Joule copilot will be packaged together as SAP Business Suite, the Thursday announcement said.
“You might remember we had an SAP Business Suite twenty-plus years ago in the proprietary on-premise world,” Jan Gilg, chief revenue officer, Americas and SAP Business Suite, said Wednesday. “Nowadays, we have, or we launched the SAP Business Suite as a truly modular, composable cloud suite.”
