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Session 2 Recap & Highlights– Unleash your Data and AI with Irfan Khan and Timo Elliott

Gaurish-Dessai
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
Tuesday
232

The session started with Irfan doing a quick round up of SAP BDC starting with the Why? behind the launch of Business Data Cloud. Irfan pointed a fundamental problem: businesses spend approximately 82% of their time on data curation & manipulation rather than business transformation. Here, SAP Business Data Cloud emerges as a revolutionary solution, designed to flip this paradigm by providing a modern Lake House architecture that harmonizes data across SAP and non-SAP systems.

Irfan highlighted that the key breakthrough of BDC is its approach to data products. By the end of 2024, SAP plans to offer around 500 data products, each representing intricate details of various business applications. The push logic mechanism allows seamless data ingestion from core ERP systems, creating a more efficient and intelligent data management ecosystem.

Screenshot 2025-06-09 at 17.22.07.pngDuring the Q&A session, Timo Elliott skillfully extracted critical insights from Khan. One pivotal discussion revolved around data quality - a perennial challenge in enterprise computing to which Irfan candidly acknowledged that while AI can help improve data matching and cleanup, organizations must still institutionalize robust data governance practices.

Irfan talked about importance of knowledge graphs - a technology that enables more nuanced, context-aware data interactions. By using vertices and edges to identify patterns and similarities, knowledge graphs can answer complex, open-ended business questions that traditional SQL interfaces cannot.  Irfan also talked about SAP BDC being an open platform designed to work with various data sources and technologies. The partnership with Databricks, for instance, demonstrates SAP's commitment to providing flexible, interoperable solutions.

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 Here are some key highlights from the Q&A session between Timo Elliott and Irfan Khan:

  1. Timo: What are the key technologies in Business Data Cloud that you're most proud of?

Irfan's highlighted the foundation service built on a modern Lake House architecture, with a unique push logic for data ingestion. He was particularly excited about creating a data product hierarchy that has been open-sourced on GitHub, allowing customers and partners to build their own data products already.

  1. Timo: What makes intelligent applications different from previous analytics applications?

Irfan's emphasized 3 key differences:

  • The integration of agents as an integral part of the applications
  • Ensuring that these applications are grounded in reliable, high-quality data with preserved business context
  • The ability to create more functionally rich applications that can curate data from both SAP and non-SAP sources
  1. Timo: How do customers with existing SAP data platforms like BW or HANA transition to Business Data Cloud?

Irfan explained that  customers have multiple options:

  • They can semantically onboard their existing data products into BDC
  • For BW systems, this could mean modernizing by bringing in data and building AI/ML capabilities on top of curated data products
  • There's flexibility to run existing systems in parallel with BDC
  1. Timo: How is SAP addressing data quality, a long-standing challenge?

Irfan acknowledged that data quality remains a complex issue. While AI can help with tasks like address matching, organizations must still:

  • Institutionalize data governance
  • Use proper master data management tools
  • Ensure data quality before implementation projects
  • Leverage BDC's capabilities to provide curated, semantically enriched data

As the webcast drew to a close, the conversation between Timo Elliott and Irfan Khan crystallized a powerful message for enterprise architects: we are standing at the precipice of a transformative era in Data and Artificial Intelligence. SAP Business Data Cloud is not just a technological solution, but a strategic capability that empowers organizations to transcend traditional data limitations. By harmonizing SAP and non-SAP data, embedding intelligent agents, and providing a robust, flexible architecture, SAP is offering more than a product – it's providing a vision of how businesses can truly unlock the potential of their data. For enterprise architects, this represents an unprecedented opportunity to move from being mere technology managers to becoming strategic innovators who can reshape how organizations understand, interact with, and derive value from their most critical asset: their data. The future is not about managing data; it's about orchestrating intelligence. To all the Enterprise Architects attending the session, the message was clear: the future belongs to those who can effectively harmonize data, leverage AI, and create intelligent, context-aware systems.

Note: Slides from the session and the recording would be only available to the registered attendees. So if you have not registered, please register now using the link below: https://go4.events.sap.com/shift-eaa-bdc-webinar/en_us/home.html

Important links:

  1. Architecture Center: https://architecture.learning.sap.com/
  2. Enterprise Architect Learning Journey: https://learning.sap.com/learning-journeys/discovering-sap-enterprise-architecture
  3. SAP Business Data Cloud Learning Journey: https://learning.sap.com/courses/introducing-sap-business-data-cloud

@PaulKurchina @moshenaveh @ralph_richter @JaSoN_Luo @Timo 

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