SAP Sapphire 2025 Recap: Scaling Smart with SAP’s Business Data Cloud & the Databricks Advantage

SAP Sapphire 2025 delivered a clear message: SAP is evolving into a business transformation engine, and data is its fuel. From Business Data Cloud (BDC) and Datasphere to the RISE and GROW with SAP programs, SAP is laying the groundwork for a unified, insight-driven future. The biggest shift? SAP’s bold embrace of AI through its new AI copilot, Joule, and deeper integrations with leading platforms like Databricks. Together, these tools empower customers to make faster, smarter, and more scalable decisions with their SAP data.

SAP’s Business Data Cloud & Datasphere: A Unified Vision

SAP’s latest evolution is about unlocking business-ready data. The SAP Business Data Cloud and Datasphere are designed to ensure SAP customers can access governed, contextualized data both from SAP and beyond without duplication or loss of meaning.

Datasphere retains semantic richness and business context across domains. BDC anchors SAP’s broader analytics and AI strategy by making that data discoverable, usable, and actionable.

This lays a firm foundation for advanced use cases across analytics and machine learning.

RISE & GROW with SAP: Simplifying the Journey

The RISE and GROW programs are SAP’s way of making modernization accessible at any scale.

RISE with SAP simplifies cloud ERP transitions for large enterprises.
GROW with SAP helps mid-market companies deploy S/4HANA Cloud quickly, using preconfigured best practices.

These programs are great enablers but what comes next after the ERP upgrade? That’s where Databricks and AI integrations come into play.

Systems Integrators: Vital Partners in the SAP Ecosystem

The show floor at Sapphire highlighted just how integral SAP Systems Integrators (SIs) remain to customer success.

SIs specialize in implementation, rollout, and optimization of SAP’s vast feature set.
They’re the force behind successful S/4HANA migrations, RISE adoption, and modular feature enablement.

While most SIs stay within SAP’s ecosystem, customers increasingly need partners who can extend that work into modern analytics and AI use cases. This is where Blue Orange complements SI efforts by bridging SAP’s transactional depth with next-gen data capabilities.

SAP + Databricks: Activating Intelligent Insights

Perhaps the most buzzworthy narrative this year was the expanding partnership between SAP and Databricks. With real momentum behind it, this collaboration offers SAP customers two powerful pathways to unlock AI and advanced analytics capabilities.

SAP Databricks now deploys natively within SAP’s Business Data Cloud, bringing scalable AI and ML capabilities directly into the SAP environment. This native integration means customers can build and deploy models without leaving their trusted SAP ecosystem.

For customers who want to leverage existing Databricks investments or need cross-platform capabilities, Delta Sharing enables secure, real-time data sharing between SAP and native Databricks environments without data duplication, while preserving row-level security and audit trails from your original SAP systems.

Key benefits include:

• Native AI/ML capabilities within SAP through SAP Databricks
• Seamless data sharing through Delta Sharing without compromising security
• Cross-platform integrations to enrich SAP data with external sources

Use cases discussed included predictive maintenance, customer 360 insights, financial forecasting, and LLM-powered copilots all made easier by exposing SAP data to Databricks for advanced analytics use cases.

“SAP’s the vault of enterprise truth. Databricks is the engine that turns it into insight.”

Introducing Joule: SAP’s AI Copilot

A major announcement at Sapphire was SAP Joule, a new generative AI assistant that’s embedded across SAP’s portfolio from S/4HANA to SuccessFactors and Datasphere. Joule is designed to act as an AI copilot for business users, helping them:

– Ask complex questions in natural language
– Surface trends, anomalies, and summaries from SAP data
– Automate repetitive tasks and accelerate decision-making

In practice, this means finance teams can automatically match accounts receivable to resolve payment disputes faster while optimizing travel bookings and expense reporting. Supply chain managers see Joule proactively identify potential machine downtime and suggest replanning scenarios to minimize production disruptions before they occur.

Joule reflects SAP’s belief that AI should be embedded, contextual, and secure leveraging SAP’s deep business logic to generate real-time value.

What makes Joule special?
Unlike generic AI tools, Joule works within SAP’s trusted environments, understands SAP business processes, and delivers results aligned with roles, permissions, and workflows.

Joule is just the beginning of SAP’s AI strategy and it’s one more reason why activating SAP data in external platforms like Databricks adds exponential value.

What Customers Are Asking

From the event floor to VIP roundtables, common customer questions included:

– “Is SAP now ready for advanced analytics and AI?”
– “How do we expose SAP data to data science teams securely?”
– “What’s the role of Databricks or other modern platforms in our SAP roadmap?”
– “How do Joule, Datasphere, and BDC work together?”

It’s clear that customers want clarity, speed, and ROI. They need partners to help them translate SAP’s evolution into real business outcomes.

Where Blue Orange Digital Fits In

At Blue Orange, we help SAP customers go beyond implementation and into intelligence.

– We partner with SAP SIs to extend their impact into AI, advanced analytics, and cross-platform integration.
– We bring deep experience in Databricks lakehouse architecture enabling full lifecycle activation of SAP data.
– We help companies build AI strategies with Joule and beyond, pairing business logic with model-ready infrastructure.

From strategy to execution, we’re the trusted guide helping SAP customers unlock what’s next.

Ready to unlock what’s next with your SAP data? Connect with our team to explore how AI, advanced analytics, and lakehouse architecture can accelerate your business outcomes. Visit blueorange.digital/contact-us/o take that step.