Measuring Data Fabric TCO: How a Unified Business Data Fabric Provides the Foundation for AI 

The modern data landscape is currently characterized by a “great unbundling,” where architectural flexibility often comes at the cost of seamless integration. This fragmentation frequently leads to “pilot purgatory,” where data initiatives stall due to the technical friction of treating data as a byproduct rather than a high-velocity capital asset. 

In this benchmark, we compared two paths to deliver the same end-state outcome:

• SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP path): Implemented in a provisioned tenant using a defined finance scenario, capturing elapsed time, engineering effort, and platform consumption aligned to published pricing. 
• DIY data fabric (DIY path): Architected to production standards and decomposed into build-and-run tasks across ingestion, modeling, governance, semantics/graph, analytics, application enablement, and agent orchestration. Effort and cost were modeled using published service pricing and standardized burdened labor assumptions.

Contact us for the report.