Business data fabric

Give every enterprise application and AI agent universal business context.
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Build your data foundation for agentic AI

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What is a business data fabric?

A business data fabric is an architecture that turns all your data and context in one governed foundation, serving as the trusted knowledge core for every enterprise application and AI agent.

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Connect all your data with full business context

Harmonize SAP and third-party data with a trusted knowledge core that preserves business context and delivers unmatched understanding of your business.

Ground every AI agent in trusted semantics

Ensure every agent, application, and decision is grounded in universal business context, enriched by active metadata that continuously learns from new and existing data.

Adapt compute to every workload

Run data and AI workloads across Spark, SQL, and multi-model engines with flexible compute that matches the right engine to what each workload needs.

Explore business data fabric capabilities

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Run any workload on any data type

Process analytics, AI, and transactional workloads across relational, graph, vector, and spatial data in a single, unified engine.

Manage compute with elastic scalability

Scale compute and storage independently with intelligent tiering to optimize performance and cost as workload demands evolve.

Improve predictability of AI costs

Execute AI compute with native workload management and in-memory speed, dramatically reducing inference time and lowering TCO.

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WEBINAR
Build the data foundation for agentic AI with a business data fabric

Join a webinar to learn how SAP Business Data Cloud enables scalable AI by connecting data and business context across a unified, governed data landscape.

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See how customers are succeeding with SAP

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Preserving business meaning across a global network

Ericsson unified semantics and business context across petabytes of data spanning 180+ countries, driven by governed, reusable data products

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Simplifying data governance across 350M+ customers

Vodafone reduced its BW footprint by 80% by consolidating multiple markets into a single semantic layer – delivering governed, trusted data that serves 350M+ customers

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Treating data and AI as a shared business capability

Google reduced manual reconciliation by aligning finance and IT on shared organizational knowledge – enabling faster customer P&L reporting across their business data fabric.

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Unifying 500 billion business signals in real-time for AI

Team Liquid unified real-time event, training, and health data with full context for AI, saving 10,000+ hours of manual work.

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See what analysts are saying about SAP

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SAP is a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment

Find out why SAP is recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment.

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SAP is a Leader in Master Data Management

Find out why SAP is recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Master Data Management Solutions Q2 2025 report.

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SAP is a Visionary in Analytics and Business Intelligence

Find out why SAP is recognized as a Visionary in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2025.

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Resources

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Measuring Data Fabric TCO

Explore how SAP Business Data Cloud saves up to 67% in TCO with a data fabric compared to DIY.

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The fabric of data and AI

Learn how SAP Business Data Cloud brings together context, governance, and orchestration to accelerate insights and intelligence.

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Getting started series: Experience SAP Business Data Cloud

Learn how to use SAP Business Data Cloud to turn raw data into real-time insights with prebuilt apps, data modeling tools, and SAP Databricks.

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BDC Catalog in SAP Discovery Center

Explore SAP Business Data Cloud capacity services with missions, roadmaps, and guidance that help you connect, manage, and analyze SAP and third-party data.

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FAQ

A business data fabric is an architecture that connects data and context in one governed foundation, serving as the trusted knowledge core for every enterprise application and AI agent. Unlike traditional data management approaches, a business data fabric preserves the meaning behind your data by design, making it foundational for scalable, trustworthy AI. It brings together critical capabilities such as data integration, lakehouse, data products, data marketplace, semantics, knowledge graphs, and modeling into a unified platform without compromising architectural flexibility.

A knowledge core is the central layer of a business data fabric that connects your data, processes, policies, simulations, and semantics into a unified system. It goes beyond a traditional knowledge graph by enabling AI agents to understand how your business actually works, not just what the data says. Without it, AI agents can conflict with each other or optimize for the wrong outcomes.

A data lake or data warehouse stores and organizes data but does not preserve the business context around it. A business data fabric goes further by connecting that context across your entire landscape, making data not just accessible but interpretable. This distinction becomes critical when AI systems need to make autonomous decisions that align with real business outcomes.

*Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research; Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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