When you’re charting your SAP transformation, connector licensing might not be the first thing on your mind. But it becomes critical the moment your team starts planning how to move and activate SAP data in Snowflake.
That’s why I’ve spent time this month digging into the real differences between OEM licensing, solution extensions, and BDC Connect-powered options for Snowflake. I’ve also done a deep dive into how these options shape the way you build, govern, and pay for SAP data products that travel across the enterprise.
What Do These Terms Even Mean?
Let’s unpack it.
- OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer): This is where SAP deeply embeds a third-party platform directly into its ecosystem, wrapping it in SAP commercial terms. If your team is evaluating the SAP Databricks offering, that’s what you’re looking at. The connector is pre-configured, governed by SAP SLAs, and provisioned through SAP contracts.
- Solution Extension: This is different. SAP has validated and certified a partner’s product, but it still runs independently. That’s the case with Snowflake. SAP sells Snowflake as a solution extension, meaning it’s an approved partner with tight integration, but Snowflake retains its identity, UI, roadmap, and direct customer success relationship. You get deep alignment with SAP semantics and governance, but the freedom to innovate in Snowflake’s platform.
- BDC Connect: This is the path for customers who already have a Snowflake contract and want to enable SAP integration. That’s where the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect solution enters. It allows you to connect existing Snowflake environments to BDC via a zero-copy, bidirectional integration.
The real magic with BDC Connect is that it brings authoritative SAP data products—built with semantics and governance—into your Snowflake environment without physical duplication. You compute in Snowflake, keep the data in SAP, and stay aligned across all analytics platforms.
But What About Cost?
If you’ve been through a Datasphere implementation, you’ve probably felt the pinch.
Many customers initially adopted SAP Datasphere as a way to modernize analytics around their core SAP systems. But the moment they wanted to push data out—whether to cloud storage, BigQuery, or Snowflake—they ran into Premium Outbound. It’s a separate SKU that meters outbound replication volume in Capacity Units. The more you replicated, the more it cost.
And for enterprise-grade data movement, it didn’t take long for those charges to stack up.
The surprise for many teams was how fast the outbound traffic added up—not just from full loads, but from deltas, retries, and ongoing refresh. The pricing model wasn’t always obvious at the start, and it turned clean-looking architecture diagrams into FinOps headaches.
That’s part of what makes the BDC Connect approach different. When you use BDC Connect with Snowflake, you’re not replicating data. You’re accessing SAP data products directly via zero-copy. There’s no staging to S3, no ETL jobs to run, and no duplication of data. What Snowflake sees is the semantic product. What SAP tracks is the compute required to serve that product to Snowflake.
That compute is what SAP refers to as a BDC compute uplift. It’s not billed as Premium Outbound. Instead, it draws from your existing BDC Capacity Units—aligned with how you budget for other BDC services. It still matters, especially at scale, but it’s much more predictable, and it keeps you away from the per-gigabyte billing model that caught many off guard with Datasphere.
This is a subtle but important difference. It shifts the conversation from “How much data did we move?” to “What insights are we computing, and how often?”
Let’s Talk Use Cases: Open Order Allocation
To ground this in something real, consider the open order allocation use case we’ve been discussing over the past few weeks.
In the past, an ABAP program would pull open orders, stock levels, purchase orders, and customer segments. Fulfillment analysts would tweak the allocation manually, balancing constraints like customer priority and warehouse availability. It was tedious, manual, and error-prone.
Now, that same logic can be rebuilt using SAP data products exposed to Snowflake through BDC Connect. You layer in customer categorization from Salesforce, apply optimization models using Cortex AI, and push back approved allocations directly to SAP using BDC write-back.
And that’s where the connector choice matters.
- If you’re OEM’d into Databricks, your environment may be shaped by SAP’s delivery terms.
- With Snowflake as a solution extension, you get all the certified interoperability with full autonomy.
- If you go the BDC Connect route, you can take what you have today and evolve—just be aware of the BDC compute uplift for inbound queries.
Four Questions You Should Be Asking
These come up in nearly every strategy session we run. Here’s a quick preview, with more detail coming in future blogs:
- Will my integration path maintain consistent semantics across Fiori, SAC, and Snowflake?
Yes—if you’re using SAP data products through BDC Connect or the Snowflake Solution Extension, semantics are preserved. That means fewer reconciliation issues and more confidence in cross-platform KPIs. - How does my connector choice influence FinOps and operational transparency?
Connector model defines what you’re paying for—whether it’s data volume, compute, or a platform license. Some models offer real-time visibility and levers to tune spend. Others don’t.
- Am I building a pipeline, or a governed product ecosystem with lineage, metadata, and accountability?
Snowflake and BDC Connect push toward governed products, not pipelines. Horizon and Dynamic Tables make governance tangible.
- Who owns the roadmap—SAP or the partner? And how will that affect the speed of innovation?
With OEM, SAP owns more of the lifecycle. With a solution extension like Snowflake, you benefit from SAP integration without being gated by SAP’s release cadence.
We’ll unpack each of these further in a dedicated series.
Making the Right Call Between OEM, Solution Extension, or BDC Connect
At Hakkoda, we’ve helped clients across industries architect Snowflake-powered SAP transformations with clarity and control. Our delivery model spans the SAP and Snowflake ecosystem, with hands-on experience using the BDC Connect solution to build governed, reusable, and extensible data products that live across both platforms.
We don’t treat data strategy as a tooling conversation. We treat it as the foundation for executing better decisions.
If your team is standing at this crossroad, let’s talk.
