We’ve been hearing the same thing more and more in conversations with customers and organisations navigating SAP: “SAP data is messy”, “What’s going on with SAP Business Data Cloud?”, “It feels complicated”.
At the same time, SAP has been introducing major changes to how SAP data is accessed, governed, and analysed, particularly with SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), Datasphere, and tighter integration with platforms like Snowflake and Databricks. For many organisations, it’s not always clear what problem SAP is actually trying to solve, or how these pieces fit together.
To unpack this, I sat down with Jorel Digman, our Head of New Business, to answer the 16 questions we’re most often asked about SAP.
1. What do most people misunderstand about SAP data?
Most people assume SAP data is messy. In reality, it is highly structured. Its complexity simply reflects the complex business processes it supports.
2. Is that a technology problem or more of a legacy problem?
It’s primarily a problem of limited understanding. SAP contains tens of thousands of tables because it models diverse business processes. Within their own domain, people usually understand the data well, but cross‑domain understanding is often limited.
3. When clients say their SAP data is a mess, what are they actually dealing with?
They are usually referring to how SAP data appears in analytics or management reports. By the time data reaches those reports, it has been extracted, transformed, and often mixed with other sources, sometimes even manually manipulated in Excel. The mess is typically in the extraction and modelling, not the SAP source data itself.
4. How would you explain SAP Business Data Cloud to a finance or operations leader?
SAP Business Data Cloud provides SAP‑authored reporting models built on deep understanding of SAP processes. These models get organisations most of the way to meaningful reporting out of the box. BDC also introduces AI‑enabled analytics, allowing faster insights with prebuilt models and AI features.
5. What problem is SAP trying to solve with BDC?
Traditionally, analytics systems were separate from SAP and required overnight data extractions. BDC makes SAP data instantly available for analytics, dramatically reducing time and effort to move data and enabling near real‑time insights.
6. What doesn’t BDC try to do?
BDC is not designed to be a repository for all enterprise data. It focuses on SAP sources, while enabling easy integration with external big‑data platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake.
7. BDC isn’t built for a single destination, right?
Correct. BDC integrates seamlessly with popular cloud data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks, giving customers flexibility to use BDC alongside their preferred data cloud environments.
8. How should customers think about Snowflake vs. Databricks in relation to BDC?
The choice typically comes down to cost and in‑house skill sets. Teams strong in Python and code‑first engineering may prefer Databricks; teams focused on SQL‑based warehousing may prefer Snowflake. From a BDC standpoint, both are supported equally well.
9. Where does the SAP Datasphere fit into all of this?
Datasphere focuses on preparing SAP data for analytics, machine learning, and AI. Workloads may run in Snowflake or Databricks, but Datasphere governs and models the SAP data and makes it available to those workloads.
10. Does Datasphere matter more once AI or advanced analytics enter the picture?
Yes. AI requires high‑quality, trusted data. Because SAP data represents critical business processes, it is essential for AI initiatives. Datasphere provides well-modelled, accessible SAP data to support AI workloads effectively.
11. What does zero‑copy data change in practice?
Zero‑copy data allows workloads to access data without moving or duplicating it. It enables rapid provisioning of non‑production environments for development or testing, often in minutes, without the overhead of traditional data cloning.
12. If an organisation is still on SAP ECC, do they need to wait to use BDC?
No. BDC works with ECC as well as S/4HANA. While S/4HANA provides additional features, ECC customers can already benefit from BDC’s predefined models and data‑management capabilities.
13. If an organisation has shifted to S/4HANA, what changes for their data architecture?
S/4HANA combined with BDC creates a fully integrated, real‑time data platform. This enables near real‑time analytics, embedded AI capabilities, and tighter coupling between operational systems and analytics.
14. What’s the biggest myth to clear up?
The myth that SAP data is difficult. With the right expertise and accelerators, both those built into BDC and those provided by partners, working with SAP data can be efficient and highly effective.
15. What is one thing companies walk away with from Snap Analytics’ SAP BDC Readiness Workshop?
A clear roadmap showing where BDC will deliver business value. The workshop highlights opportunities to move beyond traditional BI reporting and begin leveraging AI‑enabled analytics supported by BDC’s accelerators and governance features.
16. Is the retirement of BW 7.5 a good opportunity to evaluate future direction?
Yes. BDC’s bridge functionality allows organisations to maintain their existing BW backend while modernising the front end through BDC. This enables a controlled, phased migration from BW to BDC without a disruptive big‑bang transition.
