Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting business leaders at our post-SAP Sapphire event. There was a clear sense of momentum in the room, as conversations centered on one of the most transformative shifts in technology we’ve seen: the move towards a truly data-driven enterprise, powered by Artificial Intelligence.
As I shared with the audience, this isn’t just another tech trend. It’s a fundamental change in how businesses will operate, compete, and innovate. And at the heart of this change lies a critical challenge: unlocking the immense value trapped within your data, especially within your SAP systems.
For those who don’t know us, Mero has been in the data game since 1972. From the early days of SAP Business Intelligence Warehouse (version 1.2B in the late ‘90’s!) to today’s complex cloud environments, we’ve helped New Zealand’s leading organisations navigate their data journey. Our experience has shown us that while technology evolves, the core goal remains the same: turning data into decisive action.
Today, SAP has placed a massive bet on this future with its Business Data Cloud (BDC). Let’s unpack what this means for you and your organisation.
The Real Driver: From Passive Reports to Active AI
For years, we’ve used AI for analytics and insights. But we’re now entering the era of Agentic AI.
Think of it this way: traditional AI is like a brilliant analyst who provides you with a detailed report. Agentic AI is an autonomous team member who reads the report, identifies an issue, schedules the maintenance, orders the parts, and adjusts the production plan—all without direct human intervention.
Imagine an IoT sensor on your factory floor detecting a potential machine failure. An AI agent could cross-reference this with your SAP maintenance schedules, production plans, and resource availability, then autonomously generate a maintenance order to prevent costly downtime.
This level of autonomy demands something profound from your data: it must be clean, reliable, contextual, and instantly accessible, regardless of whether it lives in SAP S/4HANA or a third-party sensor network.
The Bridge: Why a Data Fabric is No Longer Optional
How do you connect these intelligent agents to your disparate data sources without building a spaghetti junction of custom integrations? The answer is a Data Fabric.
A Data Fabric is a modern data architecture that creates a unified, intelligent layer over your entire data landscape. It doesn’t move all your data into one giant bucket. Instead, it provides seamless, real-time access to data where it lives, preserving its critical business context.
This architecture is the key to closing the persistent “data divide” between your IT teams, who manage the data, and your business leaders, who need it to make decisions. With a data fabric, self-service analytics becomes a reality, supercharged by Generative AI and natural language queries. It provides the essential context that connects a raw piece of data to a real-world business process, enabling true closed-loop analytics—where insights automatically lead to intelligent actions.
What is SAP Business Data Cloud?
This brings us to SAP’s big announcement. SAP Business Data Cloud is SAP’s strategic implementation of a data fabric architecture.
It’s a fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution designed to unify your SAP and non-SAP data. Essentially, SAP manages the pipeline, extracting pre-packaged, semantically-rich “data products” from your SAP applications (think of these as the next evolution of Business Content for those with a BW background). This data is made available in a modern data lakehouse, ready to be consumed by analytics and AI tools with a “zero-copy” approach, meaning data can be shared without creating costly and complex duplicates.
At launch, BDC will run on AWS, with other hyperscalers to follow. The key components work in concert:
- SAP Datasphere: Forms the foundation, providing data integration, cataloging, and modelling to ensure data retains its business context.
- SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC): Delivers robust analytics, interactive dashboards, and unified enterprise planning to visualise insights and drive decisions.
- Integrated SAP Databricks: This is a crucial differentiator. It embeds world-class data engineering and AI/Machine Learning capabilities directly into the environment, allowing you to apply advanced models to both your SAP and third-party data securely.
The “So What” for New Zealand SAP Customers: A Mero Perspective
For the roughly 34 large organisations in New Zealand still running on-premise SAP BW, SAP is providing a modernisation path. The “Lift, Shift, and Innovate” strategy suggests moving your BW environment to a Private Cloud Edition (PCE), which extends maintenance support and provides a bridge to transition to Datasphere over time.
This is a significant and welcome direction from SAP. The ability to provide pre-built, high-quality data products from their suite is a powerful advantage that can dramatically simplify data extraction.
However, as a strategic data partner, it’s our job to provide the full picture.
- SAP is Playing Catch-Up: SAP is a little late to the data fabric party. Forward-thinking organisations, including many of our clients, have already been building similar modern data architectures for years using hyperscaler technologies like Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure, which are arguably more mature in this space.
- The Cost of “Kicking the Can”: The feedback we’ve received from businesses that have explored the BW to Private Cloud Edition migration path is that the cost can be prohibitive. It risks becoming an expensive interim step that increases the overall complexity of your solution stack, effectively “kicking the can down the road” on a true modernisation effort.
- You Have Options: SAP Business Data Cloud is a compelling new option, but it’s not the only option. The best architecture for your business might be pure BDC, a hybrid model, or a solution built on a hyperscaler platform using best-in-class tools like Fivetran or Informatica for data integration.
Your Strategy is More Important Than Your Tech Stack
The introduction of SAP Business Data Cloud signals a clear and exciting future. But technology is only the enabler. Your success will depend on a clear, pragmatic data strategy that aligns with your specific business goals.
The fundamental questions remain: What are the critical decisions you need to make? What data do you need to make them? And how will you turn the resulting insights into action?
If you’re an SAP customer wondering what this all means for your roadmap, let’s talk. At Mero, we don’t just implement technology; we partner with you to navigate these complex choices, ensuring your data becomes the strategic asset that will power your business.
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