Fragmentation of the SAP world

The atomized SAP cloud universe

Following the WEF 2025, SAP CEO Christian Klein wrote a commentary on the state of the world: "In recent years, the World Economic Forum in Davos has repeatedly addressed the increasing fragmentation of the world—both within societies and between nations. At the same time, many Davos participants have high hopes for artificial intelligence. It is expected to bring significant progress in many areas.

SAP played a major role in the fragmentation of the ERP world, as an erratic product and cloud strategy created many construction sites, many works in progress. What was irritating was that what SAP did to repair old problems created new construction sites and failed to eliminate old ones! The SAP Data Hub product was meant to eliminate data chaos, data management fragmentation, and a lack of ERP orchestration. The result was just the opposite: SAP Data Hub did not solve a single problem, and instead became a problem for the IT managers themselves, as Data Hub created a very high CPU load on the servers. The concept remained adequate, but server capacities were not sufficient for this misstep.

The fragmentation of data landscapes continued, and SAP CEO Christian Klein pinned his new hopes on AI. Meanwhile, an atomization of the ERP architecture can be observed through SAP's AI solutions. More than 200 individual AI applications are said to have already taken root in the ERP system. It remains to be seen how SAP will ever be able to control this uncontrolled growth. Once again, Christian Klein from his latest commentary: "Precisely because I work for a company that harnesses the benefits of AI for companies and societies, I am convinced that these hopes are justified. AI can make economies more productive and resilient by making processes more efficient and helping companies find answers to disruptive events such as global trade crises, natural disasters, or regional conflicts."

The age of real-time AI from SAP, Databricks, and Confluent

What looked like a unique move by SAP in mid-February was put into perspective a few days ago with an announcement by Databricks and Confluent: by combining Confluent's complete data streaming platform with Databricks' data intelligence platform, companies can use real-time data for AI-powered decisions. The new integrations between Confluent's Tableflow and Databricks Unity Catalog provide seamless data governance and control across operational and analytical systems.

As SAP put it in a recent press release: the groundbreaking partnership between SAP and Databricks heralds a new era in enterprise data management, as two market leaders work together to redefine how applications and data platforms work together. Databricks' technologies for data engineering, machine learning and AI workloads are already integrated into the new solution. "The SAP Business Data Cloud enables the optimal use of business data for enterprise AI," emphasized Christian Klein during the presentation of the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC).

"If organizations want to maximize the value of their AI investments, they need to centralize their data, AI, analytics, and governance," said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, on the deepening partnership with Confluent. "As we help more and more organizations develop data intelligence, trusted enterprise data is becoming increasingly important. We are pleased that Confluent has selected our Unity Catalog and Delta Lake solutions for open governance and storage. Together, we can deliver long-term value to our customers.

SAP licenses and data streams for BDC and Suite

The products SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud), Data Hub and Datasphere as well as parts of BW are now being combined into the SAP Business Data Cloud and complemented by a relaunch of the SAP Business Suite.

Former SAP manager Werner Dähn asked on LinkedIn: "I would like to know how SAP data will be imported into BDC in the short and long term. Will it continue to be via replication flows and data flows or via the Databricks track?" He expects SAP Datasphere to remain the product of choice. Ultimately, it will also be a question of licensing costs and the extent to which SAP customers can and want to afford the friendlier Databricks product.

The leading systems are SAP, Databricks, or Confluent

The statement made by Confluent and Databricks can also be applied to the cooperation between SAP and Databricks. With this arbitrariness in mind, it is now up to SAP customers to ultimately put their trust in ERP. With the new capabilities offered, operational data from Confluent or SAP is seamlessly integrated into Databricks, while data from Databricks is freely available throughout the enterprise for all processing operations. The parameters used by AI applications and the spreadsheets used by data analysts now provide a unified view of the same real-time data. As a result, informed AI-driven decisions can be made more quickly across the enterprise. This seamless integration of operational applications, analytics, and governance is critical for AI innovation at scale—whether with SAP, Databricks, or Confluent.

Finally, a quote from SAP CEO Christian Klein: "The use of cloud technology in the enterprise, business networks across enterprise boundaries, and a more harmonized, trusted global environment—all of this reduces fragmentation, promotes collaboration and sharing, and helps us reap even greater benefits from AI in the future. Like a 10,000-piece puzzle, the beginning is certainly difficult, but once the first pieces are put together, the big picture becomes clear, and progress accelerates. It is up to us today to put the AI puzzle together and reduce the fragmentation of our world—one piece at a time. Then we will be able to realize the full potential of AI—not just for the benefit of a few, but for the benefit of many.”