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 connects 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 and 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 matched to the best runtime for each task.

Explore business data fabric capabilities

Govern your data with an open lakehouse catalog

Discover and share data across Apache Iceberg–compatible engines and AI agents with centralized permissions and lineage.

Query data wherever it resides

Federate access to 35+ source types (relational databases, data warehouses, object store, and more) with zero copies.

Accelerate queries without manual tuning

Automatically precompute and optimize queries as usage evolves to deliver sub-second analytics and AI at petabyte scale.

Explore SAP Business Data Cloud
WEBINAR SERIES
Getting Started with SAP Business Data Cloud

Data and IT leaders are unifying fragmented systems to make faster, more confident decisions. Watch the webcasts to see how it's done.

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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 recognized as 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 named as two of the Leaders in Master Data Management

Find out why SAP and SAP Reltio are positioned as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Master Data Management Solutions, Q2 2025 report.

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SAP named as 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 2026.

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

Watch the webinars 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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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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The Autonomous Enterprise Starts with Business Data

Learn how trusted business data, context, and governance provide the foundation for agentic AI and autonomous operations at scale.

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SAP Business Data Cloud 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 data fabric connects and manages distributed data across complex landscapes. A business data fabric goes further by preserving the business context behind that data, including its semantics, policies, and business processes. This gives applications and AI agents consistent access to data with the meaning needed to generate trusted insights and actions.

A knowledge core connects semantics, trusted entities, relationships, metadata, ontologies, and business rules to provide a shared business context for analytics and AI. Unlike a static semantic layer, it is continuously enriched by how data is used across domains and use cases, incorporating new relationships, decisions, and process logic as the business evolves. The knowledge core gives AI agents a consistent and adaptive understanding of how the business operates, helping them reason and act with greater context and alignment.

A business data fabric gives agents governed access to organizational data with the business context needed to understand relationships, reason across domains, and take informed action. By grounding agents in shared semantics, enterprise knowledge, and real-time data, this architectural approach enables more trusted and coordinated AI-driven decisions and workflows.

A data lake or data warehouse stores and organizes data, but it 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.

A semantic layer gives data consistent business meaning by defining shared metrics, relationships, and business logic across domains. Within a business data fabric, it connects these semantics with data models, ontologies, and knowledge graphs so analytics, applications, and AI can interpret and use data consistently across various use cases.

SAP Business Data Cloud, a key component of SAP Business AI Platform, is anchored in a business data fabric that delivers universal business context and serves as the trusted knowledge core for every enterprise application and agent. This knowledge core brings together SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Master Data Governance, and SAP Reltio to unify SAP and third-party data, including SAP Business Warehouse, under enterprise-wide governance so that every AI initiative operates from the same trusted foundation.

 

The SAP business data fabric runs on intelligent compute, giving customers flexibility to run best-of-breed compute for every data and AI workload based on business demands with SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Databricks, and the SAP Snowflake solution extension.

 

Together, this foundation delivers a complete understanding of your business built on knowledge only SAP can provide: business process logic, rich operational data products, intelligent content, and global industry deployments. With AI and Joule Agents, that trusted business context becomes action, helping customers automate processes and make faster, better-informed decisions.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms, By Anirudh Ganeshan, Christopher Long, Edgar Macari, 29 June 2026.

 

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.

 

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

 

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.