At the “SAP Business Unleashed Innovation Day” held in Shanghai on March 14, 2025, SAP and Databricks jointly launched the SAP Business Data Cloud. This solution integrates enterprise data from SAP and third-party sources to build a unified semantic model, leveraging Databricks’ data engineering and AI technologies. It enables a transformative shift in business decision-making from being experience-driven to data-driven.

This solution marks the entry of enterprise data management into a new era of  Lakehouse architecture, providing a high-quality data foundation for the application of large AI models.

Core Breakthroughs and Innovative Value

1. Data Architecture Revolution
Overcomes the limitations of traditional data warehouses and data lakes by leveraging open-source frameworks like Delta Lake and Iceberg to build a transactional data lakehouse. This architecture supports ACID transactions and intelligent caching mechanisms. For a global retail company, this reduced data query latency from hours to minutes and improved supply chain prediction accuracy by 19%.

2. Semantic Data Governance
Built domain models covering 120+ business processes using SAP Datasphere, preserving semantic information for core data such as general ledger and procurement. CFOs can directly access real-time external data like consumer price indices, which automatically associates with financial data products to form dynamic financial analysis views.

3. AI Agent Empowerment
Deep integration with SAP’s generative AI co-pilot, Joule, enabling ready-to-use intelligent agents across domains like finance, service, and sales. A chemical company used a sales intelligent agent to resolve customer disputes, reducing average response time from 48 hours to 2.3 hours, while also customizing supply chain optimization models using an agent generator.

4. Multimodal Data Ecosystem
Supports unified governance of structured and unstructured data (e.g., IoT sensor data, text, and web pages). A manufacturing company achieved a 27% improvement in equipment failure prediction accuracy and reduced maintenance costs by 15% through this platform.

Customer Practices and Industry Impact

Over 200 global enterprises have leveraged this solution to monetize their data assets. Henkel, for example, built a sustainable data ecosystem using semantic data models, boosting business innovation efficiency by 35%. SAP states that this platform will accelerate the adoption of generative AI in scenarios like financial reconciliation and supply chain optimization, with plans to launch an intelligent agent application library covering 80% of advanced analytics scenarios by 2025.

This collaboration marks a milestone in the technology integration of SAP and Databricks, signaling a new phase in enterprise data management transitioning from a “collection of tools” to an “intelligent hub.” As SAP CEO Christian Klein highlighted at the launch event: “We are redefining the relationship between data and business—data is no longer siloed but a flowing network of value creation.”