SAP and AWS Advance Data Integration for Enterprise AI with SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Amazon Athena
SAP and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced an extension of their long-standing collaboration with the planned introduction of SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) Connect for Amazon Athena. The integration is designed to enable closer interoperability between SAP-managed business data and AWS analytics and AI services, supporting organisations in building data-driven applications and AI solutions with reduced data movement and duplication.
Overview of the announcement
The initiative focuses on enabling bi-directional, zero-copy access between SAP Business Data Cloud and Amazon Athena. In practice, this means that SAP data products can be accessed directly from AWS analytics environments without requiring traditional data replication or batch extraction processes.
The approach is intended to preserve the original business context and semantics of SAP data while making it available for query and analysis within AWS. According to SAP, this supports faster access to operational and transactional data across business functions while maintaining governance and security controls.
Integration across AWS data and AI services
The integration extends beyond analytics to include compatibility with a broader set of AWS services, including analytics, machine learning, and generative AI capabilities. These include Amazon Athena for querying data, Amazon SageMaker for machine learning development, and Amazon Bedrock for building generative AI applications.
By connecting SAP Business Data Cloud with these services, organisations can access SAP data products in near real time and use them to support analytics workflows, reporting, and AI-driven applications.
How SAP Business Data Cloud Connect works
The integration is built on the concept of “zero-copy” data access. Rather than duplicating datasets into separate systems, SAP data remains within the SAP environment while being made accessible through AWS tools such as Amazon Athena.
Key characteristics of this approach include:
Data remains in place: SAP data is not physically moved or replicated for basic access and querying
Preserved semantics: Business context and data definitions remain intact across systems
Near real-time access: Users can query SAP data directly from AWS environments
Flexible downstream use: Data can be analysed in place or further processed within AWS for advanced use cases
This model is intended to reduce latency between data generation and insight creation while simplifying data pipelines.
Expected business outcomes
SAP and AWS position the integration as a way to support broader enterprise data and AI strategies. Potential benefits highlighted in the announcement include:
Establishing a unified foundation for SAP and non-SAP data
Accelerating development of AI applications using trusted enterprise data
Enabling self-service analytics across business units
Reducing time required to move from raw data to actionable insights
Supporting the development of AI agents informed by operational business data
From a governance perspective, the integration is also designed to maintain enterprise controls around security, access, and compliance within the AWS environment.
Perspective from SAP and AWS
Commenting on the initiative, SAP noted the growing importance of operationalising enterprise data at scale for AI use cases. Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering, stated:
“The next era of business will be defined by how well organizations turn intelligence into action at scale.”
From the AWS perspective, Ruba Borno, Vice President of Global Specialists and Partners, stated:
“SAP and AWS share a commitment to helping customers put their most valuable data to work.”
She also added:
“By combining SAP Business Data Cloud with AWS secure, global infrastructure and advanced AI services, organisations can unlock mission-critical SAP data and act on it at the speed and scale their business demands.”
Availability and regions
SAP Business Data Cloud is available on AWS across multiple regions, including the U.S. East (N. Virginia), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney), Canada (Central), and South America (São Paulo), as well as the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
The planned SAP BDC Connect for Amazon Athena capability will build on this existing regional availability, supporting deployment within these environments.