For years, SAP data has been locked away, complex, siloed, and costly to access. Most companies never fully leveraged it for real-time insights, analytics, or AI.
With SAP + Snowflake, enterprises get real-time, zero-copy access to trusted data. The result: faster insights, smarter decisions, and measurable business impact.
In this blog, we explore why SAP data has been so hard to use and how BlueCloud and Snowflake together make integration simple, powerful, and ready for AI-driven outcomes.
Why Was Migrating Data from SAP So Complex, Costly, and Time-Consuming?
For most enterprises, SAP holds decades of critical data, locked inside complex structures never built for modern analytics or AI. Tightly linked tables and fragile dependencies make access difficult, changes risky, and extraction dependent on deep SAP expertise.
Traditionally, modernization meant costly, multi-year projects—often exceeding $10M—turning SAP complexity into a major barrier to innovation and keeping powerful data in the hands of only a few specialists.
What Challenges Slow SAP and Snowflake Integration?
Until now, connecting SAP data with Snowflake has been complex, resource-heavy, and difficult to scale. Most approaches relied on multiple tools and custom-built connectors just to move data between systems.
This created performance bottlenecks, increased security and governance risk, and required ongoing engineering effort to maintain.
Several key challenges stand in the way:
Loss of business context and semantics when exporting raw data
SAP data is tightly packed with business logic and meaning. Simply dumping tables into Snowflake strips that context, leaving raw data without usable business semantics.
Governance, Lineage, and Data Integrity Risks
Once SAP data is copied, duplication creates version conflicts, mismatches, and major governance challenges. Security, lineage, compliance, and a single source of truth become much harder to maintain.
High Operational Overhead
Traditional integrations rely on custom pipelines and scheduled extracts—slow, heavy, and error-prone, especially across complex SAP and non-SAP landscapes.
No Unified View of the Business
To drive real insight, organizations need to combine SAP data with non-SAP sources like SaaS platforms, marketing systems, and external datasets. But with data spread across different formats, structures, and governance models, alignment is difficult. Instead of a single, trusted view of the business, teams are left working with fragmented information.
Data Delays and Slower Decisions
Legacy methods relied on scheduled exports, leaving Snowflake data outdated and brittle whenever SAP changed.
How SAP Snowflake Connector and SAP BDC Connect Change the Game without Full Migration of Data
The new joint offering from SAP and Snowflake removes the complexity that has long slowed SAP-to-cloud projects. It lets enterprises access SAP data in Snowflake in real time, with full business context, without the overhead of custom pipelines or massive migrations. Here’s how it works:
SAP Snowflake: Bringing Snowflake into SAP’s Business Data Fabric with Semantic Richness
Preserve business meaning and governance
SAP Snowflake extends SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) to Snowflake while keeping all semantics, lineage, and business logic intact. Teams can work with trusted SAP data in Snowflake without losing context.
A unified, enterprise-ready data foundation
SAP and non-SAP data can now be harmonized into a single business data fabric. Snowflake’s scalable compute, AI/ML capabilities, and collaboration features are fully accessible while SAP remains the source of truth.
Real-time access for analytics and AI
Data teams can build AI/ML applications, dashboards, and analytics in real time. No ETL pipelines, no complex transformations—just direct, governed access.
Lower operational overhead
Integration is streamlined and SAP-native. Snowflake provides the storage and compute backbone, while SAP handles the integration logic, reducing costs and complexity.
SAP BDC Connect: Zero-Copy, Bidirectional Data Sharing
Break down legacy barriers
SAP BDC Connect treats SAP data as cloud-native, bridging historical gaps between SAP and Snowflake.
Lower Costs, Smarter Access: Skip Egress Fees with Snowflake
One of the biggest advantages of the connector is cost. Unlike platforms that force data movement and incur egress fees, Snowflake provides direct, zero-copy access to SAP data eliminating extraction costs and keeping your focus on insights.
No duplication, no extra costs
Zero-copy sharing avoids data movement and egress fees, unlike traditional approaches. Data can be referenced directly in Snowflake, keeping governance, lineage, and compliance intact.
Seamless integration with existing Snowflake environments
Hybrid landscapes combining SAP and non-SAP data are easy to manage. No massive migrations, no complex pipelines. Just governed, ready-to-use data.
Faster time-to-value for analytics and AI
Teams can leverage SAP data immediately for AI, analytics, and data engineering pipelines, lowering operational costs and accelerating insights.
Instant access to the full Snowflake ecosystem
The connector unlocks Snowflake capabilities like Cortex functions, agentic systems, AI applications, secure semantic models, cross-cloud collaboration, and integrated Data 360 experiences, turning SAP data into a true business asset.
What Becoming SAP-Enabled in Snowflake Unlocks for Your Business
Enterprises no longer have to choose between keeping SAP data governed and taking full advantage of cloud-native analytics and AI. They can do both.
This integration makes SAP data cloud-ready, semantically rich, and fully governed, while opening up Snowflake’s full capabilities across analytics, AI/ML, data engineering, and application development. Teams can work directly on trusted SAP data (and non-SAP sources) without losing context, enabling faster insights, smarter decisions, and real-time innovation.
1. Reliable, Trusted Data
Data teams can build analytics, reporting, AI/ML and data engineering workflows on top of semantically rich, trusted SAP data (plus non-SAP data), eliminating data quality or interpretation problems caused by context loss.
2. Simplified Architecture & Lower Costs
No more custom ETL pipelines, fewer duplication risks, and unified governance reduce total cost of ownership and accelerate time-to-insight.
3. Accelerated Innovation
With harmonized and queryable data, building dashboards, intelligent applications, and AI agents is faster, less risky, and more scalable.
4. Hybrid Data Support
Combine SAP with non-SAP sources including CRM, marketing, IoT, supply chain, and more without licensing constraints. Enterprises gain a single source of truth across the entire data estate.
5. Faster Analytics & AI Enablement
Once SAP data is queryable in Snowflake, teams can deliver: Predictive demand, Supply chain intelligence, Finance forecasting, Material availability insights, Automated reporting, Copilots for operations, procurement, finance, manufacturing
6. Better Data Quality & Governance
Using Snowflake Horizon for metadata lineage, classification, quality rules, and access policies makes SAP’s historical data quality challenges manageable and fully compliant.
BlueCloud: Where SAP and Snowflake Meet
BlueCloud sits at the intersection of SAP and Snowflake and that makes all the difference. Most partners only understand one side. We bring both together:
- SAP expertise: deep ECC and S/4HANA knowledge, experience with core master data, and hands-on know-how in operational workflows.
- Snowflake expertise: scalable, governed architectures, real-time analytics, AI/ML enablement, and secure, zero-copy sharing.
We apply this synergy across industries to accelerate time-to-value, reduce risk, and eliminate technical debt. We start small, scale fast, and build a foundation for analytics, AI, and cloud-ready innovation.
BlueCloud makes SAP data instantly actionable. We unlock semantically rich SAP data, combine it with non-SAP sources, and unleash the full power of Snowflake without costly migrations, and complex pipelines.
Unlike $10M+ consulting projects, BlueCloud delivers SAP data access efficiently and pragmatically.
Interested in seeing what your SAP data could do in Snowflake? Reach out to our team of experts to discuss how we can help you build a solution your operators, finance leaders, and customers can actually use.
Learn how we can help leverage the full power of Snowflake once your SAP data is fully integrated:
Success Story: METUS Transforms SAP Data into $1.5M in Efficiency with BlueCloud + Snowflake
Ask Your Data Anything: Discover the Power of Snowflake Intelligence
Elevating data analytics: How BlueInsights and Cortex AI empower organizations to talk to their data
