The business intelligence (BI) and analytics market is undergoing fundamental change due to rapid advances in generative AI and increased demand for more intuitive, end-to-end use of data.

A trustworthy database is crucial in the age of AI. In one global survey of 1,200 specialists and IT decision-makers 55 percent of respondents cited poor data quality as their biggest challenge. And almost half of them find it difficult to harmonize data across multiple environments.

SAP Business Data Cloud offers companies a fully managed SaaS solution that unifies, controls and seamlessly connects SAP data with third-party data. This data platform provides companies with the tools they need to make even better decisions and gain new insights across all areas of their business.

After just eight months on the market, SAP Business Data Cloud received top marks from leading analyst firms for its analytics and BI solutions, primarily for SAP Analytics Cloud.

SAP ranked as one of the leading providers in the IDC MarketScape study “Worldwide Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment”.

The IDC MarketScape study provides detailed quantitative and qualitative assessments of the technology market. The assessment highlights key factors for IT buyers looking to introduce, modernize or replace business intelligence and analytics tools in their organization.

“Companies are constantly striving to make data-driven decisions,” said Megha Kumar, research vice president, analytics and AI, at IDC. “This need for valuable insights across all areas puts pressure on data and analytics teams. Companies will therefore look for automation, generative AI and agent-based AI capabilities in their business intelligence and analytics platform. Importantly, these insights are available in everyday work to enable better collaboration and faster decisions.”

The IDC MarketScape study ranks SAP as a leader based on the following strengths:

• Focus on integrating data from SAP and third-party sources so customers can leverage analytics, planning and AI in a single environment
• Solution that supports both technical and non-technical users with self-service analytics, ad hoc searches in data, and integrated analytics in business applications
• Features such as copy-free data integration with a focus on extending the environment beyond traditional SAP data sources

Read one here Excerpt from the IDC study with further details.

SAP ranked as one of the leading providers in the 2025 BARC Score study “Enterprise BI & Analytics Platforms”.

The BARC Score study evaluates solutions that meet a wide range of BI and analytics needs. BARC ranks SAP as a leader based on the following strengths:

• Integrated user-centric planning and analytics solution – with embedded capabilities for advanced analytics and application design
• Intelligent and natural language text generation capabilities help users quickly drill down into more details about datasets by automatically identifying trends and outliers.
• Exclusive connectivity, real-time access, integrated analytics and preconfigured content for SAP sources and applications accelerate implementation and help gain insights from these systems.
• Functions for controlling master data and aligning key figures across the entire company
• Flexible product usage options with multi-tenant or private-tenant options for public cloud deployment on AWS, Azure, Alibaba and GCP

Read it here entire study by BARC.

This recognition in both the IDC MarketScape study and BARC underscores the central role of SAP Business Data Cloud for companies that want to be truly data-driven.

SAP provides a unified, intelligent and scalable platform for the use of enterprise AI, continuing to set the standard for modern data and analytics. This enables customers to gain reliable insights and take decisive action in an increasingly complex business landscape.

Dan Yu is Chief Marketing Officer for SAP Business Data Cloud at SAP.