Bi-Directional Zero-Copy Integration: What SAP BDC Connect for Athena Delivers
SAP and Amazon Web Services have announced SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) Connect for Amazon Athena, a bi-directional zero-copy data sharing capability designed to streamline enterprise AI analytics. Instead of moving or duplicating data across platforms, the integration allows Amazon Athena to access semantically rich SAP Business Data Cloud data products in near real time, directly where they reside. This bi-directional data integration lets organizations query business-critical information, preserve its original business context, and avoid replication delays that traditionally slow analytics projects. By keeping data in place, enterprises can reduce operational friction and focus on building AI agents, dashboards, and reports faster. The collaboration extends SAP’s mission-critical business data expertise with AWS’s cloud-scale analytics and AI services, creating a shared data foundation that supports next-generation AI workloads without the typical overhead of data movement and transformation.
Zero-Copy Data Sharing Cuts Latency and Infrastructure Overhead
Zero-copy data sharing eliminates the need to replicate or move enterprise datasets before analysis, a common bottleneck in traditional data architectures. With SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Amazon Athena, data is accessed in place, significantly reducing latency associated with extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines. Because the same dataset can be reused across analytics and AI applications, organizations avoid maintaining multiple synchronized copies, shrinking storage footprints and minimizing infrastructure complexity. The zero-copy design also preserves SAP’s semantic models and governance controls, so business meaning and security policies travel with the data. This approach is particularly valuable for enterprise AI analytics, where models require timely access to accurate, contextual information. By avoiding redundant transfers, teams can accelerate time-to-insight from weeks to hours, delivering more responsive decision-making while keeping infrastructure and operational overhead under tighter control.
Enabling Enterprise AI and Analytics Directly on Shared Business Data
The Amazon Athena integration with SAP Business Data Cloud enables organizations to run AI and analytics directly on trusted, shared data without duplication. Business teams can query SAP data products from Athena and then push results into other AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Quick, and Amazon SageMaker, building AI agents and intelligent applications on a consistent data foundation. Because SAP BDC provides semantically aware, governed data products, AI models can operate on context-rich information rather than raw tables, improving accuracy and relevance. Self-service analytics becomes more achievable as analysts access curated datasets through familiar AWS tools, reducing dependence on IT-led data preparation. The combination of zero-copy data sharing and bi-directional data integration ensures that both SAP-centric and AWS-native workloads benefit from the same up-to-date business data, powering a broad spectrum of enterprise AI analytics scenarios without re-architecting existing systems.
Strategic Partnership: SAP Business Data Meets AWS AI Infrastructure
This initiative builds on the long-standing partnership between SAP and AWS, aligning SAP’s business data expertise with AWS’s global cloud infrastructure and advanced AI services. SAP Business Data Cloud offers a single, trusted foundation for mission-critical data products, while AWS provides scalable compute, storage, and analytics capabilities. Together, they enable customers to access SAP data products across the AWS ecosystem, creating a governed environment for building AI agents and analytics solutions across all lines of business. Executives from both companies emphasize that the next era of business will be defined by how effectively organizations turn intelligence into action at scale. By simplifying access to SAP data and integrating it tightly with AWS AI services, the partnership aims to help enterprises put their most valuable data to work more quickly, modernize their analytics strategies, and advance toward more autonomous, insight-driven operations.