The Rise of the Lakehouse in SAP Ecosystems: Transitioning from SAP BW/4HANA to a Unified Databricks Lakehouse Architecture

Traditional enterprise data architectures often struggle to balance the structured reliability of SAP systems with the high-performance demands of modern big data and AI/ML workloads. While SAP BW/4HANA remains a robust platform for structured reporting, its proprietary nature and schema-on-write constraints can create significant data silos. This paper explores the transition from the traditional SAP Business Warehouse (BW) environment to a unified Databricks Lakehouse architecture. We propose a transition framework that maps SAP's Layered Scalable Architecture (LSA++) to the modern Medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold). By leveraging Delta Lake and Unity Catalog, organizations can achieve a "lean SAP core" where operational processes remain in SAP, but advanced analytics and cross-functional data intelligence are unified within a scalable, open-source-based Lakehouse.