The gap between enterprise data and AI is really a context gap: when data is lifted and duplicated into a separate AI platform, the semantics that make it meaningful get left behind, then rebuilt from scratch - costly, slow, and out of date by the time you get an answer. SAP Business Data Cloud is built to close that gap by keeping the data in place and letting the meaning travel with it.
This was the 6th–7th in Applexus's monthly global ValuePath series - a hands-on working session, not a product overview. Attendees worked in a live BDC trial tenant alongside the demo, and the recording captures the full end-to-end build.
Hosted by Srinivasan Kumar (Director, Analytics - 30+ years SAP process, analytics & AI) and Soujanya Poluru (Consulting Lead, Analytics - 15+ years BW, BDC, Databricks).
Enterprise data lives across S/4HANA plus peripheral SAP and non-SAP systems; the AI platform lives elsewhere. Every lift-and-shift adds cost, governance risk, and strips business context. The session frames why real-time, business-context AI needs the data platform and ERP genuinely integrated - not bridged after the fact.
One license, one platform: SAP Datasphere (successor to BW), SAP Analytics Cloud (visualization and planning), SAP Databricks and SAP Snowflake - all on a shared HANA Data Lake object store - with Joule on top for agentic and conversational AI. The demo opens right in the BDC Cockpit.
A data product is a business dataset - master or transactional - exposed via API and discoverable in the catalog with rich metadata. The key distinction: SAP-managed products, where SAP builds and maintains the pipeline for you (the modern successor to BW extractors), versus custom products you own end to end.
Because ~77% of the world's business transactions run through SAP, the trusted data AI needs already lives there. BDC Connect shares SAP and non-SAP data bidirectionally with zero copy - BigQuery is GA today; Microsoft and AWS target Q1 2027. Includes when to use SAP Databricks versus native.
The working core. S/4HANA actuals shared into Databricks via Delta Sharing - no copy - then a Prophet time-series model, Bayesian-tuned and logged to MLflow, produces a 30-day forecast with confidence bounds. A credit-risk file sharpens it. The forecast flows back to BDC and Datasphere, into SAP Analytics Cloud.
BW 7.x mainstream maintenance ends December 2027 (extended to 2030). A BDC license includes BW Private Cloud Edition - a purely technical lift-and-shift into BDC with nothing changing for your users, buying runway while you innovate. The session walks both the Lift-Shift-Innovate and greenfield paths.
The accelerators that de-risk the move: CeleRIX for BW migration (~40% efficiency), IRIS for AI agents, and Euler for data discovery. Closes on a live question - is BDC a prerequisite for seamless planning? Short answer: no, given the right conditions on data centre, HANA Cloud, and tenant mapping.
Applexus offers a complimentary two-week BW Modernisation Assessment - using proprietary accelerators (CeleRIX, Euler) that have cut implementation time by 30–40% on live projects - and delivers a clear readout to your leadership team on your path to SAP Business Data Cloud.
