CData-SAP Partnership Expands Connectivity for SAP Business Data Cloud

SAP has expanded its partnership with CData Software to enhance the data connectivity capabilities of the SAP Business Data Cloud. This collaboration directly integrates CData’s extensive connector technology into the platform, providing users with streamlined, real-time access to various non-SAP data sources.

Enhancing Data Integration Capabilities

As a fully managed SaaS solution, SAP Business Data Cloud unifies SAP and third-party data. It creates a comprehensive data foundation for analytics, AI, and operations. However, the platform’s effectiveness hinges on its ability to seamlessly connect with external data systems where critical business information often resides.

The integration of CData’s embedded connectors directly addresses this requirement. It provides a robust framework for accessing data from numerous cloud services, on-premise databases, and business applications. A key technical feature of this integration is the use of a consistent, SQL-based interface. This allows SAP Business Data Cloud to query external data sources in real time without requiring data replication. This method offers significant advantages for enterprises, including improved data governance, reduced latency, and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by eliminating the need to move and store redundant datasets.

Strategic Implications for Enterprise Data

This enhanced connectivity has noteworthy implications for enterprise data strategies, particularly as organizations increasingly leverage AI. Integrating diverse data quickly and securely is fundamental to developing effective AI models and advanced analytics.

According to Manish Patel, Chief Product Officer at CData. “As AI strategies move from experimentation to execution, the ability to integrate diverse data quickly and securely is becoming a competitive necessity.”

Thus, the collaboration enables several key use cases across operations:

• For sales and marketing, a unified view of the customer can be created by blending SAP S/4HANA data with CRM information from platforms like Salesforce.
• Integrating real-time market data from external services directly into SAP Analytics Cloud can enrich financial planning and analysis.
• AI-driven predictive maintenance models can be fed with live data from legacy manufacturing systems, improving operational efficiency.

Finally, by providing immediate, self-service access to non-SAP data, the partnership aims to accelerate time-to-insight and empower organizations to build a more agile, AI-ready data ecosystem.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Data connectivity is now a core business strategy. Market trends show a decisive shift towards a composable or two-tier ERP model, where companies augment their core SAP systems with various best-of-breed cloud applications for functions like CRM, HR, and supply chain management. Instead of viewing integration as a project-based IT problem, SAPinsiders should see robust connectivity as a fundamental business capability. The ability to seamlessly access data from any source, as enabled by CData’s embedded connectors in SAP Business Data Cloud, allows your business to be agile, innovate with best-of-breed tools, and derive value from a diverse technology landscape.

Federated, real-time access is the future for secure and AI-ready data. SAPinsider research highlights growing concerns around cybersecurity, particularly data exfiltration risks from having data spread across multiple cloud and on-premise environments. The traditional approach of replicating data into a central store introduces latency and multiplies the security footprint and governance complexity. CData’s technology, now embedded in SAP Business Data Cloud, champions a data federation or “virtualization” approach. It allows you to query and use non-SAP data in real time without moving it. For SAPinsiders, this mitigates security risks by leaving data securely in its source system.

The SAP ecosystem is embracing open, composable architectures. This partnership signals that SAP actively supports the evolution from a closed system to an open, interconnected platform. While CData has long offered a broad portfolio of connectors for the SAP ecosystem, embedding their technology directly into a core SAP offering like the Business Data Cloud represents a significant philosophical shift. SAPinsiders can now build a modern, multi-vendor architecture with greater confidence, using SAP’s toolset as a central hub for data integration. This move reduces the dependency on third-party-only integration platforms and lowers the barrier to creating a unified data fabric across your enterprise.