It depends on your situation, but the decision framework is clearer than it might appear. BW/4HANA is the right path for organisations with complex, heavily customised BW landscapes that rely on standard BW capabilities — data warehousing with HANA performance, BEx queries and Analysis for Office. BDC is the right path for organisations who want to reduce custom data engineering effort, embrace pre-built SAP data products, enable Databricks AI/ML on SAP data, and integrate SAP data with external platforms (Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.) without replication. The practical point: both paths extend BW maintenance to 2030. You do not need to decide immediately. A readiness assessment — which takes 3–4 weeks — evaluates your BW landscape against both options and produces a recommendation with justification. 2iSolutions delivers that assessment as the starting point for either engagement.

BDC Connect is SAP's zero-copy data sharing capability — it allows SAP data products to be discovered and consumed by external platforms (Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric, Amazon Athena) without physically copying the data out of SAP's governance boundary. This means your analytics teams on external platforms can query SAP-governed business data in place, with semantic context intact, without 2iSolutions or your team building and maintaining custom replication pipelines. Whether you need it depends on your external analytics ecosystem: if your organisation already uses Snowflake or BigQuery for non-SAP analytics and wants to bring SAP data into that ecosystem without replication overhead, BDC Connect is exactly what you need. If you are working exclusively within SAP tools (BDC + SAC), Connect is not a priority.

Yes — and this is actually a strategic advantage. The best time to implement BDC is alongside or shortly after an S/4HANA go-live, because the S/4HANA data model is being designed at that moment. The BDC data products for Finance, Supply Chain and Sales align to S/4HANA's object model — so having the same partner managing both the S/4HANA implementation and the BDC data product activation means the analytics layer is designed with full knowledge of what is in the source system. Running them separately — different partners at different times — introduces the most common analytics failure: a data model designed for a source system that does not match how the source was actually configured. 2iSolutions delivers both S/4HANA implementations and BDC implementations, which is precisely why clients ask us to do both.

SAP Business Data Cloud uses the same Capacity Unit (CU) metric as SAP Datasphere, allowing organisations to allocate CUs flexibly across Datasphere, SAC, BW/4HANA PCE and Databricks within the BDC subscription. SAP has provided an official online sizing calculator (available since April 2025) to estimate costs based on actual use cases. The bundled BDC subscription generally delivers better value than purchasing Datasphere, SAC and Databricks separately — particularly for organisations that need all three components. For existing SAP Datasphere and SAC customers, the migration to BDC is designed to be cost-neutral or cost-positive, with no rip-and-replace of existing investments. 2iSolutions includes a licensing advisory as part of the BDC assessment engagement — producing an apples-to-apples comparison of your current spend versus the BDC subscription for your usage profile.

BDC is particularly relevant for mid-market organisations precisely because of the pre-built data products. Large enterprises typically have dedicated data engineering teams who can build and maintain custom extractors from S/4HANA. Mid-market organisations often do not — and they end up with analytics that are perpetually behind their ERP configuration because there is no resource to maintain the extraction layer. BDC's pre-built, SAP-maintained data products solve this problem at the source: the extractors are maintained by SAP, not by the customer's internal team. For mid-market SAP GROW customers and organisations running SAP Public Cloud, BDC's data products align closely to the standard S/4HANA object model — making activation faster and custom development minimal. The entry point for BDC is accessible for mid-market use cases, and the capacity unit model scales with actual usage.