Unlocking AI/ML Use Cases on SAP and Non-SAP Data Has Never Been Easier
In Q1 2025, SAP introduced a fully managed SaaS solution that brings together SAP’s data & analytics products into a single unified platform, called SAP Business Data Cloud. In addition, the company revealed a landmark partnership with Databricks, bringing the advanced capabilities of Databricks directly into SAP Business Data Cloud. At the SAP Sapphire conference in May, SAP unveiled further innovations to SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Databricks became generally available to customers on AWS.
In this article, I will explore why these developments matter and what they mean for the future of analytics on SAP data.
How often have you faced a “simple” requirement—like bringing ERP data into your dashboards—only to realize just how much effort it takes?
From data extraction, transformation, and integration to replicating complex business logic, building a usable data foundation often turns into a months-long project.
This challenge is all too common, especially for organizations relying on SAP. We’ve seen it across industries: extracting the data is just the beginning.
This is why SAP’s introduction of SAP Business Data Cloud earlier this year, combined with the strategic partnership with Databricks, marks a game-changing moment in enterprise data strategy, enabling customers to unlock data intelligence on their most important business data from SAP
The real complexity lies in re-creating the business context—logic, metadata, and relationships—so that your analytics and AI models make sense.
From data extraction, transformation, and integration to replicating complex business logic, building a usable data foundation often turns into a months-long project.
This challenge is all too common, especially for organizations relying on SAP. We’ve seen it across industries: extracting the data is just the beginning. The real complexity lies in re-creating the business context—logic, metadata, and relationships—so that your analytics and AI models make sense.
This is why SAP’s introduction of SAP Business Data Cloud earlier this year, combined with the strategic partnership with Databricks, marks a game-changing moment in enterprise data strategy, enabling customers to unlock data intelligence on their most important business data from SAP
What is SAP Business Data Cloud?
SAP Business Data Cloud is a fully managed SaaS platform that brings together the power of several SAP & third-party technologies into a unified solution:
- SAP Datasphere for rich business semantics and data modeling
- SAP Analytics Cloud for integrated analytics, planning & visualization
- SAP Business Warehouse (BW/4HANA) to migrate & modernize existing BW investments
- SAP Databricks, a fully managed version of Databricks included natively in the platform to enable scalable data engineering, machine learning, and AI workloads
- SAP Joule, SAP’s natural language AI assistant to help you query, explore, and interact with your data using plain language
This platform brings the Lakehouse paradigm to SAP data. You get the flexibility of a data lake with the reliability and performance of a data warehouse.
Building on open standards, SAP Business Data Cloud leverages the Delta Lake architecture and Delta Tables to store data, allowing it to manage large amounts of data with features such as ACID transactions and scalable metadata handling.
SAP also provides a suite of curated, fully managed data products that replicate core business data from systems like SAP S/4HANA, Ariba, SuccessFactors, and others – all consolidated into a harmonized, analytics-ready data model called SAP Knowledge Graph, which provides users, analytics tools & AI agents (such as SAP Joule) the business context and semantics of SAP data.
Zero ETL with Delta Sharing: SAP Meets Databricks
And here’s where it gets even more exciting: thanks to the native integration with SAP Databricks using the open Delta Sharing protocol, your SAP data, stored in Delta Lake, can now be accessed directly in Databricks. No copying or re-ingestion required.
That’s right: Zero ETL.
This seamless bi-directional connection allows your data teams to:
- Activate SAP-managed or custom data products within SAP Business Data Cloud that connect to your cloud SAP applications
- Access them instantly in Databricks for data exploration, advanced transformations, AI/ML modeling, and data science
- Blend SAP data with external data from various sources using Databricks
- Use Python or SQL in Databricks Notebooks to build powerful ML/AI use cases, such as predictive models for planning & forecasting, RAG-based AI models and agentic systems
- Seamlessly publish model outcomes & predictions from SAP Databricks to SAP Business Data Cloud for planning, reporting or visualization.
And with Joule embedded across the platform, business users and analysts can interact with data conversationally—from asking complex questions to surfacing predictive insights generated by your Databricks ML models—all within the tools they already use.
A New Era for Analytics, AI & ML in the SAP + Databricks Ecosystem
As announced at the recent SAP Sapphire conference in May 2025, SAP Business Data Cloud is not just another integration layer. It’s becoming a core pillar of SAP’s application, data and AI strategy.
SAP Databricks is now Generally Available on AWS as part of SAP Business Data Cloud, with general availability planned across Azure and GCP by late 2025, enabling organizations to have streamlined access to enterprise-grade SAP data products in SAP Business Data Cloud and existing Databricks instances.
At Sapphire, SAP also announced plans to deliver hundreds of data products by end of 2025, covering the entire SAP Business Suite. For hybrid landscapes with on-premise systems (e.g. customer-managed SAP ECC, BW, or S/4HANA), the platform also supports custom data products, allowing you to make your unique datasets available to Databricks and other tools in your ecosystem.
Altogether, this unified architecture removes traditional barriers to insight, enabling faster, smarter decision-making and innovation at scale, without the pain of traditional ETL pipelines.
Ready to Learn More?
If you’re exploring how to unlock AI, machine learning, or advanced analytics use cases across your SAP and non-SAP data, we’re here to help. As experts in Databricks and Microsoft technologies, we specialize in simplifying complex data architectures and accelerating your journey to business-ready analytics & AI.
Let’s talk about how we can bring your vision to life without breaking a sweat!
SAP customers should contact their SAP account teams to get started with SAP Databricks.
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Author of the post:
Daniel Percze - Engagement Manager / Senior Business Analyst at Abylon Consulting.
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