When SAP Business Data Cloud was introduced, the promise was this: data stays at its point of origin but is linked semantically instead of migrating into ever more copies. A year on, that can be assessed soberly.
The connection to Databricks has been available since autumn 2025, and links to further data platforms are following in stages through 2026. The semantic core, which describes business objects and their relationships in machine-readable form, has meanwhile become the basis for the AI functions inside the ERP. That is the real progress: analysis now starts with the question rather than with data preparation.
For mid-sized firms this means two things. First, it pays to start where key figures are today assembled by hand from several sources. Second, clean data maintenance in the ERP remains the precondition: a data platform organises, but it repairs nothing.