Just over a year since SAP CEO Chris­t­ian Klein, SAP CEO declared his ambi­tion to make SAP ​“the no. 1 Busi­ness AI com­pa­ny,” SAP has announced a series of high-pro­file data and AI announce­ments, with poten­tial­ly major impli­ca­tions for its cus­tomer base. Most recent­ly, SAP announced SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud, a new solu­tion intend­ed to uni­fy all enter­prise data, as part of an expand­ed part­ner­ship with Databricks. 

Through both the solu­tion and this part­ner­ship, SAP and Data­bricks are team­ing up to help cus­tomers uni­fy SAP and non-SAP data, regard­less of for­mat or loca­tion, and empow­er them to build the type of strong data foun­da­tion that will be crit­i­cal for enter­pris­es look­ing to get the most val­ue out of AI appli­ca­tions. An evo­lu­tion of SAP Data­s­phere, SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud helps users build an inte­grat­ed data lay­er, eas­ing the bur­den often asso­ci­at­ed with prepar­ing orga­ni­za­tion­al data to be uti­lized by the large lan­guage mod­els (LLMs) that pow­er AI solu­tions. SAP also showed off new agent builder capa­bil­i­ties for Joule Stu­dio in SAP Build, enabling users to build cus­tom AI agents. 

“Today, enter­pris­es spend up to 50% of their total IT bud­get on data and ana­lyt­ics,” Klein said dur­ing its recent SAP Data Unleashed event. ​“Why? Because com­pa­nies face large data silos between SAP and non-SAP data, unstruc­tured and struc­tured data, with entire data-sci­en­tist depart­ments focus­ing on try­ing to bring dif­fer­ent data sources together.” 

As many SAP util­i­ty cus­tomers lever­age RISE with SAP to migrate to the cloud and adopt SAP S/4HANA, this announce­ment is of par­tic­u­lar inter­est; the future of SAP — includ­ing its busi­ness AI offer­ings — lies in the cloud. As util­i­ties com­plete their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion projects, SAP Busi­ness Data Cloud aims to help them ensure data qual­i­ty and gov­er­nance ahead of lever­ag­ing AI. 

SAP cus­tomers will have ques­tions about how they can most effec­tive­ly lever­age this new offer­ing. In the com­ing weeks, ASUG is com­mit­ted to answer­ing those ques­tions and dig­ging into the val­ue of SAP’s lat­est AI-focused play. In the imme­di­ate future, look out for a new episode of ASUG Talks fea­tur­ing ASUG CEO & Chief Com­mu­ni­ty Cham­pi­on Geoff Scott and Irfan Khan, Pres­i­dent and Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer, SAP Data & Ana­lyt­ics at SAP, about the new offer­ing and announce­ment. We’ll con­tin­ue to cov­er this excit­ing announce­ment and its val­ue for SAP util­i­ties cus­tomers through­out 2025 — and beyond.