SAP has partnered with data and AI company Databricks to launch SAP Business Data Cloud, a solution that unifies all SAP and third-party data throughout an organisation.
In its statement, SAP said the solution provides the trusted data foundation for organisations to make more impactful decisions and foster reliable AI.
According to the enterprise software firm, the solution harmonises data from organisations’ mission-critical applications with data engineering and business analytics capabilities.
The new solution natively embeds Databricks technology for data engineering, machine learning and AI workloads.
In October 2024, Jesper Schleimann, head of business AI for SAP in EMEA, said the company was really taking AI to the next level, “…and the transformative part is AI agents that are now in true business form. It also means our developers and our customers can accelerate their journeys to the cloud. We cannot forget that data is an important part in making all this happen.”
Schleimann said this is a significant step in SAP’s AI journey, with Joule in the driving seat.
“Joule is celebrating one year now, and a lot has happened in the underlying models powering the AI revolution. The new graph service will enable it [Joule] to build the bridge and be grounded into the entire ecosystem of 400 000 different tables. That's keeping all the SAP data and things in check.”
In the company’s latest announcement, SAP CEO Christian Klein said: “SAP Business Data Cloud unleashes the full value of enterprise data for business AI. It combines SAP’s unique expertise in mission-critical, end-to-end processes and semantically rich data with Databricks’ data engineering capabilities.”
Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, added: “Every company on the planet wants to get more value out of their data and greater returns on their AI investments. By joining forces with SAP, we’re helping organisations bring together all their data – regardless of format or where it lives – to govern, analyse and build domain-specific AI applications on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.”
SAP said the solution delivers fully managed SAP data products across all business processes – from finance, spend and supply chain data in SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ariba, to learning and talent data in SAP SuccessFactors.
The company added that these data products maintain their original business context and semantics, providing immediate access to high-quality data without costly extraction processes.
SAP Business Data Cloud will offer new capabilities called insight apps that use data products and AI models connected to real-time data to deliver advanced analytics and planning across all lines of business, including core enterprise analytics, finance and human resources.
SAP unveiled a series of ready-to-use Joule agents across finance, service and sales, with more to come across the SAP Business Suite. The company also announced new agent builder capability to empower customers to build and deploy their own AI agents alongside SAP's library of ready-to-deploy Joule agents.
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