The SAP community came together in Wiesbaden for the DSAG Technology Days 2025, under this year's motto “Strategy Royale – Call, Raise or Fold?” The central question was: where is it worth calling, where should you raise the stakes – and where might it be better to fold? In terms of business analytics, the answer is clear: Raise. With the SAP Business Data Cloud, the integration of Databricks and the vision for Business AI, SAP has initiated the biggest change in strategy since the introduction of S/4HANA.
Keynotes: Strategies, expectations and realities
Sebastian Westphal, DSAG board member for technology, emphasized in his keynote speech that BDC represents the biggest change since S/4HANA and has formulated clear expectations on the part of DSAG:
- Consistent, reliable data products
- Full usability of databricks
- Tangible added value through insight apps
- Transparent migration paths
- Calculable license models (keyword: capacity units)
SAP CTO Dr. Philipp Herzig focused on the principle “AI First and Suite First”: Joule as AI orchestrator embedded in the Business Suite. By the end of 2025, SAP wants to provide more than 400 productively usable generative AI scenarios. A central link here is the SAP Knowledge Graph, which serves as a semantic layer between BDC and Business AI and, according to Herzig, already represents “over 400,000 ABAP tables and 80,000 CDS views”.
Quelle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdTinjyl2Rw
The object store moves into the center
In many presentations by SAP, partners and users, the fundamental change in the architecture of the BDC became tangible. SAP HANA used to be at the center of every analytical SAP landscape. In the BDC, this focus is clearly shifting towards the object store, comparable to modern data lakehouse architectures, and thus follows the principle of hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure & Co. With the fully integrated system component SAP Databricks and the use of open standards Delta Lake and Delta Sharing, it is clear that the BDC is not a loosely-connected collection of familiar technologies. It marks a profound technical and conceptual redesign towards an open data platform that relies on open formats, scalable storage structures and seamless data exchange without copies.
Data Products and Insight Apps: More than just business content
One of the central topics was the new role of data products and insight apps in BDC. The assets actively managed by SAP go far beyond traditional business content and thus offer a higher level of operational commitment and integration maturity. SAP aims to cover all key lines of business with data products by mid-2025 – not only on the basis of S/4HANA, but also SuccessFactors and other systems. At the same time, suitable insight apps are provided on the basis of the curated SAP data products, for example the “Working Capital App” shown in several presentations.
Everything is controlled centrally in the Business Data Cloud Cockpit. This is where Insight Apps are installed and Data Products are activated and managed. In a live demo, SAP impressively demonstrated how data products can be flexibly customized as separate custom variants and seamlessly enriched with ML functions in databricks. It will be interesting to see whether the interaction between all components, and in particular between Datasphere and Databricks, will run as smoothly in everyday project work as it did in the demo.
What does BDC mean for BW customers?
There was also interesting information for classic BW customers who do not want to switch completely to Datasphere and leave their familiar environment. With the integration of SAP BW or BW/4HANA as a private cloud edition into the BDC, SAP offers an interesting option for protecting existing investments while at the same time exploiting new potential for modernization and data provision.
A data provisioning cockpit is designed to publish existing BW objects such as InfoProviders or queries as data products in the object store, so that they can be used within the BDC like the standardized data products provided by SAP. This creates a practical bridge between classic BW and the new cloud data architecture.
Another bridge – the BW Bridge – remains accessible, but is no longer regarded by SAP as the preferred transition. Together with our customer GASAG, we presented an extensive transformation project in which a change via the BW Bridge towards Datasphere was realized. It was important to us to transparently show that this architectural decision should be evaluated in the context of the SAP strategy at the time and what alternatives exist today for companies that want to secure their BW investments while taking the step into the BDC.
Watch the recording of our webinar:
"SAP Datasphere and the Databricks Lakehouse Approach"
Update SAC and Planning
On the second day of the DSAG Technology Days, which focused more on the front end, SAC and planning were the focus of several sessions. The presentation by Jie Deng and Max Gander was particularly exciting, as it made it clear how SAP is further specifying the planning strategy as part of the BDC and sees “seamless planning” as the central key concept. In addition to the announced Planning-enabled Insight Apps for the BDC, the integration of SAP Databricks for ML- and AI-supported planning scenarios will also play an important role in the future
A glance at the roadmap shows how strongly SAP prioritizes planning in the SAC and thus continues to consciously set itself apart from other providers. The new SAC Compass for Monte Carlo simulations was recently provided as a promising feature, which we will cover in detail in an upcoming blog post. In the long term, SAP is pursuing a clear vision with GenAI in planning – AI-supported commenting and automated forecasts are to become an integral part of the planning process in the future. There is just one small disappointment: the long-awaited feature for asymmetric reporting in planning will not be available until 2026.
Source: Photo from presentation “V061: SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning, Analytics and Generative AI - News and Outlook”
In addition to the focus on planning, upcoming SAC features were also presented. Particularly notable are the new watchlist with alerting and the New Builder Experience for Tables, which will significantly improve usability for table-based analysis and planning. Also presented was the new SAC home screen in the Horizon Design, which can be flexibly configured and offers real added value as a central entry point and personal launchpad.
Source: Photo from presentation “V061: SAP Analytics Cloud for Planning, Analytics and Generative AI - News and Outlook”
Summing up & key takeaways
As every year, attending the DSAG Technology Days was more than worth it for us, this time even with our own booth. We had numerous interesting conversations with customers, partners and SAP and showed countless demos of our NextTables solution for Datasphere. But what is the take-home message? Here are our key takeaways:
Standardization is the key
A common topic that ran through many of the presentations: SAP-managed data products, insight apps and business AI only deliver their full benefits when companies are willing to adopt SAP standards. This is anything but self-evident, especially when you see how many S/4HANA transformations continue to adopt and maintain customer-specific logic from the old ECC system.
And what about HANA now?
The focus on the Object Store was omnipresent at the Technology Days, but a clear strategic classification of the role of SAP HANA in the new architecture was missing. It remained unclear whether it is generally mandatory to use it from a certain layer or – as with modern lakehouse platforms – whether the data can remain completely in the object store and performance is ensured via massively parallelized Apache Spark clusters. It would have been desirable to have a clear position from SAP on this.
The new role of SAP
One notable aspect that was mentioned rather casually in several sessions: SAP is increasingly positioning itself as an enabler and the party responsible for end-to-end business and analytics processes. The integration should work “out of the box”, but in some cases it remains a black box and when problems arise, support is provided in the traditional way via SAP tickets.
With this claim, SAP is consciously taking responsibility for ensuring that data, semantics and processes converge seamlessly – from the source to the decision. This is more than just operating a cloud data platform, because SAP is also responsible for the content, structure and technical consistency. We are thus adding a crucial point to DSAG's expectations: SAP must actively take on this new role and fulfill it clearly and reliably in the market.
Customers must follow suit – raise applies to all
It is not only SAP that is intensifying the effort – customers are also being asked to do their part. Those who want to benefit from this new architecture must realign their own data strategy, consistently follow SAP standards, and be willing to invest in modern technologies.
Do you have questions about the SAP Business Data Cloud or SAP Datasphere? Please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to exchanging ideas with you!
.jpg?width=290&name=David%20Nicolay%20(1).jpg)