With the new SAP Application Data Foundation, SAP and Databricks customers gain simpler, more performant access in SAP Databricks to data from SAP applications, across cloud and on-premises.
by Sanjay Chheda, Katie Cummiskey, Patrick Werns, Akram Chetibi and Qi Su
Today's AI models are more capable than ever. What they still lack is the business context to understand how your company actually runs. For most enterprises, that context lives in SAP systems. Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies use SAP solutions to manage key business processes, enhance operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge through data-driven decision-making.
Last year, SAP and Databricks introduced SAP Databricks, which natively embedded the Databricks Data + AI Platform in SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC). Since general availability, customers including Adidas, Zalando, Mondi, and CAF have used SAP Databricks and SAP BDC Connect for Databricks to analyze, govern, and build AI on live, semantically rich SAP Data Products through zero-copy, bi-directional OpenSharing.
This week at SAP TechEd, we are announcing the next phase of our partnership. Now, we’re bringing together the expanded scope of Databricks to SAP Databricks in SAP Business Data Cloud. This makes it much easier and more performant to work with SAP enterprise data, allowing customers to realize AI value from their data.
Customers want to put their data to work: forecasting demand from years of order history, detecting anomalies in the financial close, optimizing procurement decisions, and grounding AI agents in how the business actually runs. Accessing SAP application data has been possible, but it has typically meant building and maintaining custom extraction pipelines that copy data, lose business context along the way, and fragment governance.
As SAP announced at TechEd, SAP Application Data Foundation makes data from SAP applications available for consumption in the SAP Business Data Cloud engine of choice, including SAP Databricks. It provides a cloud-native way to access SAP application data, helping to lower total cost of ownership and reduce time to value. For SAP Databricks customers, that means:
For example, a manufacturer running finance and supply chain on SAP ECC on-premises, while planning its move to the cloud, can use SAP Application Data Foundation to bring years of order history into SAP Databricks. Its data engineers can enrich that history with third-party data and build demand-forecasting models on SAP's business semantics, without custom extraction pipelines, and keep that work as they move to the cloud. The expanded partnership plans to bring the full range of Databricks data and enterprise AI capabilities to SAP Databricks, embedded within SAP BDC.
“Data is the foundation for enterprise AI. By bringing the latest scope of Databricks into SAP Business Data Cloud, we’re combining SAP’s deep understanding of business processes and mission-critical applications and agents with Databricks’ industry-leading data platform. With that, we help customers turn their enterprise data into a powerful foundation for the Autonomous Enterprise.” - Philipp Herzig, Chief Technology Officer, SAP SE
"This partnership brings together the most critical business data in the enterprise, SAP data, with the leading Data + AI Platform, Databricks. With the new SAP Application Data Foundation and SAP Databricks in BDC, companies can finally bring all of their SAP data together and unleash the full capabilities of the Databricks platform to drive business insights. They can also combine Genie with Joule to deliver that business context to every team and agent so they can get trusted answers and act on them."- Michael Kiermaier, SVP Business Strategy and Operations, Databricks
SAF-Holland, a global manufacturer of chassis components for trailers, trucks, and buses, uses SAP BDC and SAP Databricks to unify more than 100 million records of customer, delivery, and material data. The company applies machine learning to predict the reliability of customer delivery schedules. SAF-Holland now generates analyses 5x faster than with traditional reporting approaches, and turns complex SAP data into planning and supply chain insights in minutes instead of weeks.
"Opening the SAP data ecosystem to Databricks has unlocked better analysis for our internal teams and ultimately helps us deliver better outcomes for our customers."- David Gund, Senior Manager of Global Digital Intelligence, SAF-Holland
SAP Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks are available today. Talk to your SAP or Databricks account team to learn about the new SAP Application Data Foundation and expanded SAP Databricks capabilities and plan your path to analytics and AI on all your SAP data.
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