Looking Back at SAP TechEd 2025 Berlin
Back home from Berlin and back behind the keyboard. Time to reflect on SAP TechEd 2025. And yes, it was genuinely refreshing to finally have a physical TechEd in Europe again. The last one I attended was Las Vegas 2019, which feels like another era: SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) was just starting to become mainstream, SAP Datasphere (DSP) was still called Data Warehouse Cloud, and AI was mostly something shown during keynotes rather than applied in real scenarios. The virtual editions we had in the meantime were a decent attempt, but never a real substitute for the actual experience: talking to product managers, reconnecting with familiar faces, meeting new ones, and getting hands-on with the tools.
Keynote
As usual, the keynote was an avalanche of announcements, slogans, demos, and even robots on stage. But: 1 hour and 45 minutes is simply too long, especially when the keynote is scheduled at the end of a full first day (presumably to accommodate the U.S. online audience). In this keynote, SAP clearly wanted to emphasize that they are going all-in on AI. I saw a new proprietary model (SAP-RPT-1) and even a large language model for ABAP (!).
Within the analytics domain, the biggest announcement was the upcoming partnership with Snowflake, enabling integration with SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) in 2026H1. One issue with scheduling keynotes at the end of the day: half the analytics community had already heard most of this news earlier on the show floor, but okay…
BDC is everything
Speaking of BDC: what used to be SAC, Datasphere, and BW as separate domains is now being presented as a single unified landscape under BDC. Where you could previously search specifically for a SAC roadmap session or a BW deep dive, everything was now labeled as a BDC session. Meanwhile, SAP BusinessObjects was, as usual, completely ignored. Yes, BOBJ still exists, has a huge user base, will still be supported for years, has been kinda rebranded to BOBJ 2025 and is even receiving new functionality! But no, nobody at SAP seems interested in acknowledging that. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Sessions and Workshops
Returning to BDC: I would have preferred dedicated roadmap sessions for SAC and DSP with more time for detail, demos, and previews. Instead, the SAC roadmap was reduced to a few slides with low-quality screenshots and bullet points, many of which reflect functionality that is already (partially) delivered. On the reporting side, it looks like a new mobile experience is coming in 2026, and story versioning should become available next year. However, how exactly this will work or look like remains unclear unfortunately.
The workshops I attended were strong: well-prepared, well-facilitated, and coordinated closely with product managers. The downside: we mostly worked with existing functionality; things I’ve already seen and tested in both DSP and SAC. The “Discover AI in SAP BDC” workshop focused almost entirely (90%) on JustAsk in SAC. As many of you know, I’ve always been skeptical about the usefulness and practical working of JustAsk (and its predecessor Search to Insight). However, I will say: the upcoming integration with Joule is an interesting direction. The idea is that you ask Joule a data or analytics question in any SAP application (outside of SAC!), and the SAC engine delivers the resulting analysis back in the Joule chat. This actually worked quite well, albeit with the rather limited demo data model that we could use. Unfortunately, preparing SAC models for JustAsk remains extremely manual. Think: manually defining synonyms and rules per model and optimizing the model to keep it performant. I still expect Joule to eventually generate these kind of things automatically for me, or at least do proposals so I can refine them. However, according to product managers, that is not coming anytime soon. 😕
There is one SAC AI feature (or should I say “BDC AI feature” 😉) I am genuinely enthusiastic about: automatic translation and summarization of comment threads. In particular, merging comment chains across hierarchical levels could be very valuable. However, this requires a separate AI license (which I don’t have yet), so it was helpful to finally try it out firsthand in the workshop. I also spent quite some time with the UX team to test new workflows and interface concepts for SAC and provide feedback. Very interesting to see where the SAC UI is heading and how the development team is approaching this.
Crowds and Capacity
It really felt like SAP significantly underestimated attendance this year. I spent three days standing in lines as were I in a theme park. It started at the entrance, with long lines outside of the Berlin Messe before opening. All BDC sessions were consistently over capacity, with people sitting on the floor or being turned away entirely due to lack of room. I heard similar experiences from other (non-analytics) tracks. I cannot recall this happening to this extent in the past, except occasionally during hands-on workshops. This must be addressed next time. The limited number of sessions certainly didn’t help either. Where were the deep-dive technical sessions? (For example: SAC performance tuning, DSP modelling best practices etc.) I also did not see any real customer case sessions, though it is possible I missed them.
All in all, I had a good couple of days in Berlin, which is a very cool city to visit anyway! The next edition is already scheduled: October 27–29 2026, again in Berlin.
HackingSAP.com - Nov 11, 2025 | SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Datasphere
Tagged | SAP TechEd
3 comments
Anonymous
November 11, 2025Thanks, Xavier, I have remained shocked since SAP discontinued CDD (formerly Xcelsius).
Jon Spain (UK)
Xavier Hacking
November 11, 2025Yeah the list abandoned SAP BI-tools is quite impressive: Xcelsius, Deski, Roambi, Live Office, Lumira Discovery, Analysis OLAP, etc… And in the end it all comes back to Crystal Reports and Webi (and SAC (BDC) of course)…
Anonymous
November 12, 2025Interesting writeup. It is not fully true that RPT-1 is proprietary though as an open source variant has been announced specifically at this TechEd.