This morning, SAP and Snowflake announced the beginning of a strategic partnership to unlock the potential of ERP data and usher in a new era of enterprise AI.
The partnership, which takes its cue from the thousands of customers already driving high-impact business outcomes with SAP and Snowflake, hinges on the launch of two new products:
- SAP Snowflake, which makes Snowflake available as an SAP solution extension (Solex) for SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) customers
- SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, designed to integrate existing Snowflake instances with SAP Business Data Cloud for seamless, zero‑copy access.
But what will the launch of these two data products actually mean for the businesses they promise to transform? A more unified data stack built to weather the paradigm shift from generative to agentic AI.
SAP Data Products on Snowflake: Governance, AI, and FinOps in One Stack
When I meet with CIOs and operations leaders, I start with this simple truth: SAP already defines your business. The task at hand is to make that truth useful across your enterprise. That means governance your teams can trust, AI that actually helps solve real problems, and a cost model you can explain.
The fastest way I know to do all of that is to run SAP data products on Snowflake and lean on three things Snowflake does well: Horizon for governance, Cortex for AI, and Dynamic Tables for freshness and FinOps.
Why This Moment is Different
With the SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, SAP has made the pivot from “move the data and rebuild the logic somewhere else” to “publish data products with shared semantics.”
That shift matters. It means we can extend the same trusted definitions in Snowflake without reinventing KPIs or arguing over which version of truth is correct.
Snowflake complements this shift nicely. Horizon gives you full visibility across discovery, lineage, and policy. Cortex lets people ask questions using natural language and automate tasks using governed products. Dynamic Tables gives you a simple way to choose how fresh each product needs to be and what that costs.
The model we put in front of customers
SAP BDC → Bronze / Silver 1
Use SAP’s semantics and lineage from S/4HANA and ECC to define domain contracts like Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, Finance, and WAM.
Snowflake → Silver 2 / Gold / Platinum
Enrich those products with enterprise and external data. Register them in Horizon. Expose them to Cortex for natural-language questions and agent workflows.
Freshness and FinOps
Use Dynamic Tables and right-sized warehouses to set target lag per product. Some products refresh sub-hourly for operations. Others update nightly for planning. Spend follows usage, not habit.
Consumption stays consistent. Operators get Fiori tiles. Leaders get SAC boards. Cross-functional teams work in Snowflake. All three read from the same products and policies, so schema drift becomes a failed check in CI, not a surprise in production.
What Leaders Ask on Day One
Do we need Premium Outbound? No.
Do we have the right licenses? Yes. SAP BDC plus Snowflake is enough.
How do we control spending? You set freshness and compute in Snowflake by domain and persona. We make the tradeoffs clear with a latency vs. cost curve before anything goes live.
Where AI Fits (and Why It’s Safe)
AI is useful when it stands on solid ground. Cortex Analyst lets people ask questions over certified products without writing SQL.
Cortex Agents can plan and run multi-step tasks across structured and unstructured content, and they do it within Snowflake’s security model.
Horizon keeps the rules, lineage, and sensitive-data controls visible the whole time. That’s how we move quickly without losing control.
Why IBM + Hakkōda
Hakkoda is now part of IBM. That matters, because you get two dedicated delivery teams that meet in the middle:
- IBM’s SAP practice brings deep S/4HANA and ECC lineage, ODP/CDS extraction patterns, and real experience with Fiori and SAC.
- Hakkoda’s Snowflake practice brings Horizon governance, Cortex activation, secure sharing, and engineering that respects FinOps.
We use this mix every week in utilities, manufacturing, retail/CPG, and logistics. The result is faster time to value and less technical debt later.
What “Good” Looks Like in Your First 90 Days
As the launch of not one but two new data products to help bring SAP and Snowflake together might suggest, there is no one-size-fits-all model for enterprise data success. There are, however, some concrete actions you can take in the early days of implementation that can lay the groundwork for stronger overall return on investment. Those actions include:
- Stand up a few domains seeded from SAP data products. Name the owners. Set SLAs. Add contract tests.
- Publish Silver 2 and Gold in Snowflake with Horizon policies and lineage. Block schema drift in CI.
- Prove parity: the same KPI shows up in Fiori, SAC, and a Snowflake app.
- Turn on AI where it helps: Cortex Analyst for questions and Cortex Agents for repeatable tasks. Write down the guardrails.
- Tune FinOps: set freshness by product and right-size the warehouses. Show the cost and latency curve so everyone agrees on the tradeoffs.
- If you plan to scale, consider IBM Data Product Console. It puts data-mesh discipline into practice, gives domain teams ownership of their pipelines, speeds discovery and governance with GenAI assistance, and supports self-service product creation and consumption.
The Ask
If you’re already running SAP BDC and Snowflake, you’ve got everything you need to start taking advantage of SAP BDC Connect.
Give us six to eight weeks. We’ll identify two high-value products, prove data and reporting parity across Fiori, SAC, and Snowflake, wire up governance in Horizon, activate Cortex where it adds the most value, and demonstrate the FinOps curve in production.
Interested in seeing what your data products look like on Snowflake? Reach out today to schedule a 30-minute BDC to Snowflake Readiness Session with our joint IBM and Hakkoda team. In half an hour, we’ll align on domains, SLAs, data freshness, and the accelerator plan. Then we’ll go build a solution your operators, finance leaders, and customers will all be able to feel.
