From Data Silos to Data-Driven Decisions: The power of SAP Business Data Cloud

Companies increasingly have more and more data in which valuable information about their own businesses resides. But extracting value from that data requires effort that is sometimes not easy.  

In the last decade, many organizations have embraced digital transformation by incorporating analytics systems for different departments: Financial BI, operations dashboards, visualization tools in marketing or predictive analytics in logistics. While these initiatives have been valuable in isolation, they have resulted in a fragmented, complex and inconsistent environment that, paradoxically, limits the ability to make strategic data-driven decisions.  

The problem of dispersed analytical environments 

In many companies, the current analytical architecture has been built as a sum of independent solutions, often led by functional areas with technological autonomy. This generates:

• • Data silos, where each department stores, transforms and exploits information without connection or traceability with other areas.
    
  • Duplicity of information, resulting in different versions of the same KPI depending on the source consulted.
  • Inconsistency in business rules, where each unit applies its own calculations, filters or segmentations.
  • Difficulty inscaling, as maintaining and aligning multiple platforms and models is an operational and governance burden.
  • Security and compliance risks, due to lack of unified control over data access, quality and lineage.
    
    

This reality prevents many organizations from moving towards a true data-driven culture, where data not only informs, but drives agile, collaborative and coherent decisions at the corporate level.  

Business Intelligence vs. Advanced Analytics and AI  

With the abundance of data available, organizations have a variety of options for managing and analyzing it. When it comes to traditional analytics or Business Intelligence, companies usually opt for data warehouse-based architectures. 

A data warehouse is a database system specifically designed for the storage, retrieval and analysis of structured data. It serves as a central repository for an organization's historical data, focusing primarily on well-defined, structured data sources. Data warehouses are essential for generating reports, visualizations and historical analyses in business intelligence. They also provide robust data governance for cybersecurity, quality and compliance.

On the other hand, data warehouses are expensive to build and maintain, which causes delays in data processing and makes them less ideal for real-time analysis. Modifying them for changes in data schemas can also be complicated and time-consuming.

But what happens when we need to analyze not only structured data, or if we have large volumes of data and want to perform advanced analytics or machine learning or artificial intelligence tasks? In these cases, data warehouse type architectures do not meet these needs and a Data Lake- type architecture becomes necessary.

A Data Lake is a central repository for storing large amounts of raw, semi-structured and unstructured data at scale. Unlike traditional databases, data lakes are designed to handle data in its native format without the need for prior structuring.

Data Lakes store raw and untransformed data, and are highly scalable for big data and IoT applications. Data Lakes simplify data exploration by allowing users to extract information from raw data before structuring it. They support advanced analytics such as predictive modeling, anomaly detection and sentiment analysis.

However, data lakes can be difficult to manage due to their large volume and diversity of data. Proper planning is necessary to avoid disorganization and poor performance when querying unstructured data.

In this situation, you have duplicate data in two different systems (data warehouse and data lake) and changes you make in one system are unlikely to reach the other. As a result, the data is almost immediately diverted, not to mention paying to store the same data multiple times.

Therefore, a few years ago, Databricks created a new architectural paradigm: the data lakehouse.

Data lakehouses are the ideal data platform: instead of copying and transforming data in various systems, you have a platform that adapts to all types of data and data usage.   

SAP Business Data Cloud: a new vision of enterprise data  

In this context, SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) is presented as a comprehensive solution to break down this fragmentation. It is a unified cloud platform that connects, integrates, governs and analyzes data consistently across the entire organization.

The most powerful thing about SAP BDC is that it does not require companies to abandon their current systems. On the contrary, it integrates SAP and non-SAP sources natively, allowing you to work with data “at its place of origin” through federated logic and common semantics.

SAP BDC consists of a set of leading technology components, including: 

Key features of SAP BDC 

1. Unification of SAP and non-SAP data
The platform offers direct connectivity to sources such as SAP S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Salesforce, cloud databases, and massive data environments. This allows breaking information silos without the need to continuously replicate data, while maintaining data governance.

2. Advanced and predictive analytics
Thanks to SAP Analytics Cloud, users can build dashboards, predictive and simulation models directly  on centralized data, without relying exclusively on IT.

3. Data governance
SAP BDC enables the definition of roles, access, quality, lineage and traceability policies on all data assets. This ensures trust, regulatory compliance (such as GDPR) and auditing of analytical processes.

4. Scalability and flexibility in the cloud
Built on SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform), SAP BDC is ready to scale from local pilots to global deployments, while maintaining performance and security. 

5. AI and machine learning readiness
Thanks to its integration with SAP AI Core, Jupyter Notebooks and platforms such as Databricks, data governed by BDC can be used to train and deploy advanced models, including generative AI, demand forecasting, anomaly detection or predictive maintenance. 

How does SAP BDC drive a data-driven culture?  

A data-driven enterprise doesn't just need technology. It requires teams to trust data, have agile access to it, and be able to make informed decisions. SAP Business Data Cloud provides:

• • A single source of truth: all departments work with the same information, up-to-date and contextualized.  
  • Data accessible by the entire organization: from analysts to business users, everyone can exploit the data according to their role.  
  • Faster and less risky decision making: less time to prepare and validate data, more time to analyze and act.
  • Improved interdepartmental collaboration: thanks to shared semantic models and cross-departmental vision.
  • Reduced costs and technical complexity: by replacing multiple dispersed solutions with a unified platform.
    

Use cases enabled with SAP BDC    

A data-driven enterprise doesn't just need technology. It requires teams to trust data, have agile access to it, and be able to make informed decisions. SAP Business Data Cloud provides:

• • Sales forecast with AI on SAP S/4HANA historical data and external behavior. 
  • Profitability analysis by channel/customer, combining financial, commercial and logistics data.
  • Automation of financial reporting with full data traceability.
  • Support for predictive models in maintenance, production or logistics by connecting SAP with Databricks or Jupyter.
  • Data exploration with natural language in SAP Analytics Cloud by business users.

     

A future-ready ecosystem

In addition to its current capabilities, SAP BDC is integrating with emerging tools such as Insight Apps, intelligent assistants, generative AI engines and augmented analytics automation. These innovations will enable users to not only query, but to converse with their data, receive proactive recommendations and generate reports automatically. 

Conclusion

Many organizations have built fragmented analytics architectures that no longer meet the needs for agility, trust, and collaboration that today's environment demands. SAP Business Data Cloud not only solves that fragmentation, but it also lays the foundation for a truly data-driven enterprise.

With SAP BDC, the path from silos to connected intelligence is clearer and more accessible than ever. Companies that adopt it will not only gain efficiencies, but will be poised to leader, more accurate, evidence-based decisions.

At Avvale, we help organizations get the most value out of SAP Business Data Cloud by efficiently integrating their data sources, designing scalable architectures, and implementing advanced analytics models. Our approach combines technical expertise and strategic vision to drive data-driven decisions and accelerate digital transformation.