SAP Business Data Cloud: Customer and Partner Updates

Despite years of technological investments, companies continue to struggle to get the most from their data. In a global survey of 1,200 business and technology leaders, 55 percent cited poor data quality as their biggest challenge. Nearly half struggle to harmonize data across multiple ecosystems.

With even more investments being made in AI, it’s more important than ever for customers to have a solid data foundation.

That’s why in February of this year, SAP introduced SAP Business Data Cloud. This fully managed SaaS solution unifies and governs SAP and third-party data, enhancing decision-making and AI value. Databricks is natively available in SAP Business Data Cloud, which provides data and AI professionals access to industry-leading data engineering, AI, and machine learning capabilities within a single solution.

SAP Business Data Cloud momentum

Since the initial launch, we’ve made progress to support customers and advance their business data fabric journey.

Several have already adopted SAP Business Data Cloud and expect significant benefits. For example, Swedish steel distributor Tibnor is the first live SAP Business Data Cloud customer and plans to integrate SAP data with non-SAP sources so it can respond more quickly to changing market conditions.

Dag Åselius, senior IT advisor and longtime former CIO at Tibnor, said: “We’ve always tried to stay ahead of the curve in our industry. SAP Business Data Cloud opens new opportunities for integrating external data quickly — something we couldn’t even imagine just a few years ago.”

This customer momentum builds on a successful pre-launch beta program. SAP received positive feedback from those customers that saw benefits across the board, including a 20 to 50 percent improvement in data models. Moreover, the beta community agreed that SAP Business Data Cloud will allow them to get greater value out of existing investments in SAP Datasphere and Databricks.

SAP Business Data Cloud and Databricks momentum

SAP is bringing the power of Databricks into SAP Business Data Cloud with SAP Databricks, now generally available on Amazon Web Services. The allows us to serve the needs of a broader community of data and AI professionals and provides customers benefits:

• Simpler access to all data: Easily connect to contextual SAP data using zero-copy Delta Sharing and blend with third-party data
• End-to-end AI and machine learning: Develop AI and machine learning models with end-to-end lifecycle management from data prep and experimentation to deployment
• Pro-code environment: Write Spark scripts, run SQL analysis, or create machine learning models in any notebook
• Trusted data foundation: Build intelligent insights on a unified and trusted data foundation that governs and protects data and AI assets

Together, SAP Business AI and SAP Databricks offer powerful, complementary AI and machine learning capabilities.

For example, SAP Business AI allows customers to embed AI directly within their business processes. It also helps customers develop and expand AI models trained on their SAP data and deploy them directly into business processes for closed-loop decision-making.

Additionally, SAP Databricks provides a comprehensive workbench for data preparation and machine learning experimentation, as well as predictive, AI, and machine learning modeling. Customers can use SAP Databricks to develop customized AI and machine learning models on harmonized SAP and non-SAP data, tailored to their unique requirements.

Get started with SAP Business Data Cloud

Today, SAP is introducing a promotional offer to help customers get started. We will offer SAP Databricks services at a discounted consumption rate for a limited time through April 30, 2026. This will accelerate SAP Databricks workloads by allowing customers to consume more capacity at no additional cost.

Don’t miss SAP Sapphire, to be held May 19-21, 2025, in Orlando, Florida. Register for SAP Business Data Cloud sessions here.

For more about the latest SAP Databricks news, read more from Databricks here.

Irfan Khan is president and chief product officer of Data and Analytics at SAP.