Posted by:
Prasad Mhatre
Publish Date:
2 Nov, 2026
SAP TechEd strengthened the case for moving BW data warehouse capabilities into SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). For existing BW customers, the opportunity is to build on established warehouse assets while connecting them to a broader foundation for data, analytics and AI.
Bringing greater business context to data and AI
SAP's announcements point in that direction. SAP said its Knowledge Graph can now incorporate custom SAP and non-SAP data to provide richer business context. It also introduced Business Data Cloud Ontology Manager, a beta authoring experience for ontologies across SAP and third-party data.
These capabilities give business context and relationships a larger role in SAP's data and AI strategy.
Making the data product story more concrete
The announcements also made the data product story more concrete.
SAP says application data can be made available in Business Data Cloud, where teams can combine it with third-party data and create custom data products.
Business Data Cloud Connect supports zero-copy data sharing across partner platforms. SAP also highlighted SAP Reltio's ability to unify master data records from SAP and third-party systems and make the resulting profiles available as governed data products.
This matters because it gives customers a way to think beyond where data is stored.
SAP's direction is to connect data products, business semantics and partner-platform access across a governed data fabric. Dremio's federation capabilities add another way to query distributed data without moving it.
Each customer will still need to assess the supported connections and governance requirements for their own landscape.
Connecting data capabilities with AI applications
The SAP Business AI Platform is the layer that brings these data capabilities into AI applications.
SAP describes it as a platform for building, contextualising and governing AI across SAP and third-party environments. Joule Studio supports building and extending agents, while Business Data Cloud and Knowledge Graph provide trusted data and context for those agents.
This has a direct connection to BW modernisation.
SAP's product guidance describes generating data products from BW InfoProviders, sharing them with analytics and AI platforms, and continuing to run existing BW use cases.
BW can therefore contribute established data and models as customers extend their data warehouse capabilities into Business Data Cloud and connect them to SAP and partner services.
What does this mean for BW customers?
The strongest case for Business Data Cloud is how these pieces fit together: BW-generated data products, SAP and third-party data, unified master data, business context, analytics and AI development.
It gives customers a way to extend existing warehouse assets into new use cases while aligning with SAP's broader data and AI direction.
One practical way to evaluate this is to follow an important BW dataset into an analytics or AI scenario.
- Can it be exposed as a useful data product?
- Can its definitions and relationships be carried into the consuming application or agent?
- Can SAP and partner platforms access it through a governed sharing path?
This focused assessment can help customers understand where Business Data Cloud fits into their data strategy and where extending their warehouse capabilities could create the most value.
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