Last week, SAP user groups from across Europe took their annual trip to Walldorf to visit SAP’s headquarters. The 10th anniversary of the event was celebrated with a wonderful dinner visit to Heidelberg Castle, although the real star of the show was of course the interaction between SAP users and SAP product managers. This blogpost will walk readers through some of the most important insights shared with us by SAP product management in the field of data & analytics; it was co-authored by Jack Bijl, the chairman of the VNSG Analytics focus group and my annual travel companion.
SAP Analytics Cloud
Starting with SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), SAP will lean further into Joule with a(n) (ad-hoc) Story Generation functionality (called the Insight Generation Agent) that will allow users to get a starting point for their Stories from where to tailor it further to their needs.
Next up is the Data Analyzer, which will see updates that include mixed units and currencies, the creation of restricted measures and accounts (the latter which will come in handy for many end users) and finally, a revised information panel design and QoL enhancements. One of our personal favorite updates was the fact that SAC will finally get a way for end users to (slightly) edit visualizations via the Quick Builder. If a Story designer (admin) grants users the right, they will be able to edit the measures and attributes they want to use for a visualization (chart/table) within the boundaries of the respective underlying SAC model.
Story versioning (non-planning) is coming/already here for early release and will support up to 10 versions, where the URL will use the active version of a Story. This could work well in conjunction with the new composite interface functions (e.g. reusing patterns or chart colors at design time) and the increased integration efforts towards the MS Office suite.
Finally, Custom cards will become configurable on the homepage for Admins (e.g. for Admin information that is now more often than not ignored under the notifications panel because of the cluttery nature of that corner). This will allow administrators to select the notifications they deem most useful and give them a more prominent place in their daily trip through the SAC system.
Planning
In the area of Planning the most focus is on both Advanced Planning and Seamless Planning functionalities. In the area of the first, SAC Compass will be extended with complex filter support, more aggregation options (e.g. AVG excl/incl NULL/Unbooked) and the option to replace dimensions without rebuilding the underlying model. A new data action that will allow users to clear facts from a model will also be added to SAC’s planning suite soon. This method is easier and better performing when compared to scripts via advanced formulas (because it is executed on the back-end engine).
A surprise reveal was the live connection (not bidirectional but read-only) for Planning towards Snowflake being underway. Although write-back is not inherently supported, it could be achieved via a custom build using, for example, an API with a pull mechanism. Live versions in Planning Models or using the SQL connection (which is also used for Snowflake) for, for example Google BigQuery, will also become available.
If we look at the developments of Seamless Planning, SAP stated it will be extended to include data from other sources (in a Datasphere model). This includes the use of both Standard and Custom Data Products in Planning, resulting in cross consumption of SAC model data in Datasphere (e.g. views, analytic models, transformation flows). Finally, N:M tenant linking for seamless planning is also on the long-term (2027) roadmap.
Business Data Cloud
Last but certainly not least, were the updates to SAP Business Data Cloud (/Datasphere) and the road onwards from SAP BW.
Let’s get the elephant out of the room immediately: SAP confirmed that as of today, it is still not allowed to persist data via Delta Sharing (via BDC connect). Delta Share is only for the virtual sharing of Data Products, whereas Outbound Premium (RFs) are the way forward for data sharing (persistently) in the form of CDS views or SAP tables. Although some may draw different conclusions from the BDC Supplement document, the above is still SAP’s official stance according to Walldorf product management.
Moving on to Data Products, these will be (/are) categorized further (next to Standard and Custom) towards Derived Data Products (curated by SAP and derived from other data sets), Primary Data Products (directly provided from applications and not based on other data products) and Interface Data Products (DPs that can be reused across the landscape but demand a specific final structure, e.g. a financial report structure for an OpCo-like organization). Moreover, the construction of all Data Products will move to the Data Product Studio (DPS), which will arrive around the end of Q2 2026. The DPS will not be linked to a specific DSP system and will reside in the BDC Cockpit. The DPS will form a triumvirate of Data Product features alongside the Data Product Generator (for BW PCE) and the Data Sharing Cockpit (basically the DSP marketplace).
There are many customers who still have to decide on what route they will take from SAP BW onwards, and thus the people from Walldorf put significant effort in the (admittedly expensive) BW PCE migration option. BW 7.5 PCE support has been extended up to and including 2033, the lift-shift-innovate approach still stands and the Data Product Generator has been extended with the Query Template Generator as of Q4 2025 (which transforms queries into Analytic Models including facts and reusable dimensions). The only remaining objects that can not yet be transformed towards Datasphere are DTPs and Transformations; these are on the roadmap for migration support later in 2026.
Finally, BDC when customers are ready to move their BW objects into BDC (/Datasphere) equivalents and share them towards external systems for reporting purposes, Delta Sharing can also be used here. When sharing Data Products (based on BW), BDC flattens these objects towards the target system (via a Spark transformation flow); meaning they ‘lose’ their semantics as associations, texts and metadata get compressed into a single table in Parquet-file format. Note that hierarchies are not yet supported here, but will be around Q3 2026. Regarding the dates for the release of the next BDC Connect partners: for Snowflake this will be in the first half of 2026, for BigQuery in the first half of 2026 as well and for MS Fabric in Q3 of 2026.
This was a brief summary of the most important things we learned during this year’s SIG Leads trip. We hope you can take something useful from it to improve your SAP landscape towards the future, and we will catch you on our blogpost on next year’s edition!