Announcing General Availability of SAP Snowflake and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Snowflake

SAP is proud to announce two major milestones that move us closer to our vision of an open, partner-driven data ecosystem:

• General availability of SAP Snowflake solution extension for SAP Business Data Cloud
• General availability of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect for Snowflake

With this release, organizations can seamlessly combine mission critical SAP business data with Snowflake’s analytics and AI workloads, creating a unified, governed foundation for enterprise analytics, intelligent applications, and AI.

Introducing SAP Snowflake as an SAP Solution Extension

SAP Snowflake solution extension for SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) empowers customers with greater openness and choice while extending SAP BDC with Snowflake’s full capabilities.

With SAP Snowflake, customers gain access to the same enterprise-grade platform services and capabilities available in Snowflake’s Business Critical Edition. This includes Snowflake’s data warehousing, data engineering, AI, analytics, collaboration, Marketplace, and more—without any reduction in functionality. The difference lies not in what Snowflake can do, but in how it is sold, commercialized, and integrated within the SAP ecosystem.

SAP Snowflake is sold, contracted, billed, and supported by SAP, allowing customers to work with one vendor instead of two. In addition, data products can be shared directly between SAP BDC and SAP Snowflake without discrete data sharing fees, reducing cost, pipelines, and silos.

Furthermore, SAP Snowflake is fully integrated into the SAP experience—customers provision their SAP Snowflake tenant directly in SAP for Me, just like other SAP cloud services. There is no separate Snowflake account setup or manual onboarding required. Once provisioned, catalog integration with the Snowflake Horizon Catalog is done automatically.

As an SAP Solution Extension, SAP Snowflake is tightly integrated into the SAP BDC ecosystem, enabling:

• Full native Snowflake capabilities, identical to standard Snowflake deployments
• Native, zero copy access to SAP data products
• Bidirectional data sharing between SAP and Snowflake
• Preservation of business semantics, lineage, and governance
• Seamless support for analytics, AI, and intelligent content

SAP Snowflake is ideal for customers who want the enterprise capabilities of Snowflake’s platform available as part of their SAP agreement and SAP managed environment.

SAP Snowflake Provisioning in SAP for Me

Zero‑Copy Data Sharing Between SAP Business Data Cloud and Snowflake

SAP BDC was designed to address the challenge of fragmented and de contextualized data by curating SAP data into business ready data products, enriched with business semantics, lineage, and governance. As a core feature of SAP BDC, BDC Connect and its partner integrations enable these data products to be shared securely and seamlessly with Snowflake AI Data Cloud platform without copies and data movement, enabling customers to activate trusted SAP data wherever analytics and AI innovation take place.

Through SAP BDC’s integration with Snowflake, organizations can:

• Access SAP BDC data products directly within Snowflake
• Share derived Snowflake data products back into SAP BDC
• Simply their landscape by reducing costly data movement and duplication
• Maintain consistent governance and business semantics across both ecosystems

This approach significantly reduces data engineering efforts and total cost of ownership while ensuring data remains consistent and up to date.

Snowflake Zero-Copy Connector for SAP BDC Connect

BDC Connect for Your Existing Snowflake Environment

If you already run Snowflake today, SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake allows you to seamlessly integrate your existing Snowflake environment with SAP BDC—without data replication and without changing your current Snowflake setup.

SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake follows the same proven onboarding approach introduced with SAP BDC Connect for Databricks, providing a consistent, secure, and repeatable enrollment experience across SAP’s partner integrations.

Getting started begins with a simple, one time enrollment process that establishes a secure, trusted connection between SAP BDC and your Snowflake account. Once enrollment is complete, this connection enables zero copy, governed data sharing between the two platforms.

Enrollment Flow

1. The process starts in SAP for Me, where users provision a BDC Connect instance and specify the Snowflake account they want to connect. Users then move to Snowflake to create a Zero Copy connector object, which generates a unique connector identifier for the Snowflake account.
2. That connector identifier is entered back into SAP for Me as part of the BDC Connect provisioning flow. In response, BDC Connect generates an invitation URL, which the user returns to Snowflake to complete the setup.
3. When the invitation URL is applied in Snowflake, a secure handshake is performed using mutual TLS (mTLS) and the OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocol. This step verifies both systems and establishes mutual trust.
4. Once the handshake completes successfully, the Snowflake Zero Copy connector is fully linked to the BDC Connect instance. At this point, the secure connection is in place, and customers can begin sharing SAP data products from SAP BDC and consuming them in Snowflake—confident that all data access is authenticated, encrypted, and governed from day one.

Sharing SAP Data Products to Snowflake

Data providers working in SAP BDC can easily share curated SAP data products with Snowflake through a simple, governed workflow.

The process typically involves:

1. Selecting a data product within the BDC cockpit
2. Choosing the Snowflake system where a trusted relationship has already been configured
3. Initiating the sharing process

During the sharing process, SAP BDC publishes the metadata and business context associated with the data product, making it discoverable through Snowflake’s catalog integration. After the sharing process completes, the Snowflake administrator can see the data product as one of the available shares and mount it into the Snowflake Horizon Catalog as catalog linked database, where it becomes accessible to analytics and AI users.

To support different user personas and working styles, Snowflake offers multiple ways to discover and consume shared SAP data products.

1. SQL Based Experience
   For technical users, available shares can be queried directly using standard SQL, enabling immediate access from familiar scripting and development environments. The SQL examples are available in the official documentation.

1. AI Assisted Experience with Cortex AI
   With the Cortex AI Agent Cortex Code, users can provide instructions in natural language and have the required SQL generate automatically. This significantly lowers the barrier for non technical users and helps teams move from data access to insight more quickly.

1. UI Driven Experience
   Users can also take advantage of a fully UI driven experience, allowing them to discover and consume shared data products directly through the interface—without writing any code.

Sharing Derived Data Products from Snowflake Back to BDC

The integration between SAP BDC and Snowflake is fully bidirectional, enabling a closed loop data lifecycle.

Customers can use Snowflake to:

• Combine SAP and non SAP data
• Create derived datasets
• Generate AI based insights and features

These outputs can be built using data stored in Apache Iceberg 3.0, one of the leading open table formats, ensuring openness, interoperability, and long term flexibility across the data ecosystem. Once created, customers can package the results as derived data products, enriched with business semantics, rich metadata, and governance information.

The derived data products can then be published back into SAP BDC, where they become discoverable and reusable by downstream consumers across analytics, planning, and intelligent applications, extending the value of insights generated in Snowflake throughout the SAP landscape.

How to Choose Between SAP Snowflake and BDC Connect for Snowflake

The key difference between SAP Snowflake and SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake lies in how customers consume Snowflake—either as an SAP delivered solution or as an integration with an existing Snowflake environment.

With b, Snowflake is delivered as an SAP Solution Extension, meaning:

• Snowflake is sold, contracted, billed, and supported by SAP
• Customers work with one vendor instead of two
• Snowflake is tightly integrated into the SAP BDC ecosystem

The table below highlights the key differences and benefits of each.

Capability Comparison

SAP Snowflake (SolEx) is ideal for customers who want:

• A fully integrated, SAP managed Snowflake experience
• Consolidated procurement, billing, and support through SAP
• No discrete data sharing fees (however infrastructure fees still apply)

SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake is ideal for customers who:

• Already run Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud today
• Want to continue existing Snowflake investments
• Need secure, governed, zero copy access to SAP data products

Our partnership gives customers the freedom and flexibility to run data and AI workloads across SAP and non-SAP platforms—without compromising governance—by delivering a unified data  foundation for AI.

What’s Next: The Road Ahead

Last year, we announced the release of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect for Databricks, and now we’ve released SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake. We continue to move further towards our broader strategy to build an open, partner driven data ecosystem—one that enables customers to securely and seamlessly use their SAP business data across the platforms where analytics and AI innovation happen.

SAP will continue to expand the open data ecosystem by:

• Extending SAP BDC Connect to additional partners such as Google BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric, and Amazon Athena.
• Delivering a complete and intuitive UI experience to create and publish custom data products
• Introducing data product request and approval workflows to allow users to create access requests using natural language

The focus remains on making governed data sharing easy, scalable, and accessible to all users.

In Summary

With the general availability of SAP Snowflake and SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, SAP is delivering on its vision of an open, governed, AI ready data ecosystem.

Customers can now:

• Share SAP data products into Snowflake using zero copy, bidirectional integration
• Preserve business semantics, governance, and trust
• Build analytics and AI on live, curated SAP data
• Simplify procurement and operations with SAP Snowflake
• Maintain flexibility with SAP BDC Connect for existing Snowflake environments

This is not just another integration—it is a foundational step toward turning trusted SAP data into a powerful engine for enterprise analytics and AI, wherever innovation happens.

For a deeper technical view, see the SAP Business Data Cloud reference architecture and SAP Snowflake documentation.

 SAP is proud to announce two major milestones that move us closer to our vision of an open, partner-driven data ecosystem:General availability of SAP Snowflake solution extension for SAP Business Data CloudGeneral availability of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect for SnowflakeWith this release, organizations can seamlessly combine mission critical SAP business data with Snowflake’s analytics and AI workloads, creating a unified, governed foundation for enterprise analytics, intelligent applications, and AI.Introducing SAP Snowflake as an SAP Solution ExtensionSAP Snowflake solution extension for SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) empowers customers with greater openness and choice while extending SAP BDC with Snowflake’s full capabilities.With SAP Snowflake, customers gain access to the same enterprise-grade platform services and capabilities available in Snowflake’s Business Critical Edition. This includes Snowflake’s data warehousing, data engineering, AI, analytics, collaboration, Marketplace, and more—without any reduction in functionality. The difference lies not in what Snowflake can do, but in how it is sold, commercialized, and integrated within the SAP ecosystem.SAP Snowflake is sold, contracted, billed, and supported by SAP, allowing customers to work with one vendor instead of two. In addition, data products can be shared directly between SAP BDC and SAP Snowflake without discrete data sharing fees, reducing cost, pipelines, and silos.Furthermore, SAP Snowflake is fully integrated into the SAP experience—customers provision their SAP Snowflake tenant directly in SAP for Me, just like other SAP cloud services. There is no separate Snowflake account setup or manual onboarding required. Once provisioned, catalog integration with the Snowflake Horizon Catalog is done automatically.As an SAP Solution Extension, SAP Snowflake is tightly integrated into the SAP BDC ecosystem, enabling:Full native Snowflake capabilities, identical to standard Snowflake deploymentsNative, zero copy access to SAP data productsBidirectional data sharing between SAP and SnowflakePreservation of business semantics, lineage, and governanceSeamless support for analytics, AI, and intelligent contentSAP Snowflake is ideal for customers who want the enterprise capabilities of Snowflake’s platform available as part of their SAP agreement and SAP managed environment.SAP Snowflake Provisioning in SAP for MeZero‑Copy Data Sharing Between SAP Business Data Cloud and SnowflakeSAP BDC was designed to address the challenge of fragmented and de contextualized data by curating SAP data into business ready data products, enriched with business semantics, lineage, and governance. As a core feature of SAP BDC, BDC Connect and its partner integrations enable these data products to be shared securely and seamlessly with Snowflake AI Data Cloud platform without copies and data movement, enabling customers to activate trusted SAP data wherever analytics and AI innovation take place.Through SAP BDC’s integration with Snowflake, organizations can:Access SAP BDC data products directly within SnowflakeShare derived Snowflake data products back into SAP BDCSimply their landscape by reducing costly data movement and duplicationMaintain consistent governance and business semantics across both ecosystemsThis approach significantly reduces data engineering efforts and total cost of ownership while ensuring data remains consistent and up to date. Snowflake Zero-Copy Connector for SAP BDC ConnectBDC Connect for Your Existing Snowflake EnvironmentIf you already run Snowflake today, SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake allows you to seamlessly integrate your existing Snowflake environment with SAP BDC—without data replication and without changing your current Snowflake setup.SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake follows the same proven onboarding approach introduced with SAP BDC Connect for Databricks, providing a consistent, secure, and repeatable enrollment experience across SAP’s partner integrations.Getting started begins with a simple, one time enrollment process that establishes a secure, trusted connection between SAP BDC and your Snowflake account. Once enrollment is complete, this connection enables zero copy, governed data sharing between the two platforms.Enrollment FlowThe process starts in SAP for Me, where users provision a BDC Connect instance and specify the Snowflake account they want to connect. Users then move to Snowflake to create a Zero Copy connector object, which generates a unique connector identifier for the Snowflake account.That connector identifier is entered back into SAP for Me as part of the BDC Connect provisioning flow. In response, BDC Connect generates an invitation URL, which the user returns to Snowflake to complete the setup.When the invitation URL is applied in Snowflake, a secure handshake is performed using mutual TLS (mTLS) and the OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocol. This step verifies both systems and establishes mutual trust.Once the handshake completes successfully, the Snowflake Zero Copy connector is fully linked to the BDC Connect instance. At this point, the secure connection is in place, and customers can begin sharing SAP data products from SAP BDC and consuming them in Snowflake—confident that all data access is authenticated, encrypted, and governed from day one.Sharing SAP Data Products to SnowflakeData providers working in SAP BDC can easily share curated SAP data products with Snowflake through a simple, governed workflow.The process typically involves:Selecting a data product within the BDC cockpitChoosing the Snowflake system where a trusted relationship has already been configuredInitiating the sharing processDuring the sharing process, SAP BDC publishes the metadata and business context associated with the data product, making it discoverable through Snowflake’s catalog integration. After the sharing process completes, the Snowflake administrator can see the data product as one of the available shares and mount it into the Snowflake Horizon Catalog as catalog linked database, where it becomes accessible to analytics and AI users.To support different user personas and working styles, Snowflake offers multiple ways to discover and consume shared SAP data products.SQL Based ExperienceFor technical users, available shares can be queried directly using standard SQL, enabling immediate access from familiar scripting and development environments. The SQL examples are available in the official documentation.AI Assisted Experience with Cortex AIWith the Cortex AI Agent Cortex Code, users can provide instructions in natural language and have the required SQL generate automatically. This significantly lowers the barrier for non technical users and helps teams move from data access to insight more quickly.UI Driven ExperienceUsers can also take advantage of a fully UI driven experience, allowing them to discover and consume shared data products directly through the interface—without writing any code. Sharing Derived Data Products from Snowflake Back to BDCThe integration between SAP BDC and Snowflake is fully bidirectional, enabling a closed loop data lifecycle.Customers can use Snowflake to:Combine SAP and non SAP dataCreate derived datasetsGenerate AI based insights and featuresThese outputs can be built using data stored in Apache Iceberg 3.0, one of the leading open table formats, ensuring openness, interoperability, and long term flexibility across the data ecosystem. Once created, customers can package the results as derived data products, enriched with business semantics, rich metadata, and governance information.The derived data products can then be published back into SAP BDC, where they become discoverable and reusable by downstream consumers across analytics, planning, and intelligent applications, extending the value of insights generated in Snowflake throughout the SAP landscape. How to Choose Between SAP Snowflake and BDC Connect for SnowflakeThe key difference between SAP Snowflake and SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake lies in how customers consume Snowflake—either as an SAP delivered solution or as an integration with an existing Snowflake environment.With b, Snowflake is delivered as an SAP Solution Extension, meaning:Snowflake is sold, contracted, billed, and supported by SAPCustomers work with one vendor instead of twoSnowflake is tightly integrated into the SAP BDC ecosystemThe table below highlights the key differences and benefits of each.Capability ComparisonCapabilitySAP Snowflake (SolEx)SAP BDC Connect for SnowflakeSnowflake platformSnowflake provisioned and delivered by SAPCustomer’s existing Snowflake environmentCommercial modelSingle SAP contract and SAP billingSAP contract for SAP BDC + existing Snowflake contractZero‑copy access to SAP dataNative access within SAP SnowflakeEnabled via BDC ConnectBidirectional data sharingSupported (Apache Iceberg 3.0)Supported (Apache Iceberg 3.0)Technical supportFirst-level support through SAP via ServiceSupported (SAP for BDC Connect, Snowflake for platform)SAP Snowflake (SolEx) is ideal for customers who want:A fully integrated, SAP managed Snowflake experienceConsolidated procurement, billing, and support through SAPNo discrete data sharing fees (however infrastructure fees still apply)SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake is ideal for customers who:Already run Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud todayWant to continue existing Snowflake investmentsNeed secure, governed, zero copy access to SAP data productsOur partnership gives customers the freedom and flexibility to run data and AI workloads across SAP and non-SAP platforms—without compromising governance—by delivering a unified data  foundation for AI.What’s Next: The Road AheadLast year, we announced the release of SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect for Databricks, and now we’ve released SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake. We continue to move further towards our broader strategy to build an open, partner driven data ecosystem—one that enables customers to securely and seamlessly use their SAP business data across the platforms where analytics and AI innovation happen.SAP will continue to expand the open data ecosystem by:Extending SAP BDC Connect to additional partners such as Google BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric, and Amazon Athena.Delivering a complete and intuitive UI experience to create and publish custom data productsIntroducing data product request and approval workflows to allow users to create access requests using natural languageThe focus remains on making governed data sharing easy, scalable, and accessible to all users.In SummaryWith the general availability of SAP Snowflake and SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, SAP is delivering on its vision of an open, governed, AI ready data ecosystem.Customers can now:Share SAP data products into Snowflake using zero copy, bidirectional integrationPreserve business semantics, governance, and trustBuild analytics and AI on live, curated SAP dataSimplify procurement and operations with SAP SnowflakeMaintain flexibility with SAP BDC Connect for existing Snowflake environmentsThis is not just another integration—it is a foundational step toward turning trusted SAP data into a powerful engine for enterprise analytics and AI, wherever innovation happens.For a deeper technical view, see the SAP Business Data Cloud reference architecture and SAP Snowflake documentation. Read More Technology Blog Posts by SAP articles 

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