• BBP and IDES are both the pre-installed data packages in an SAP system, such as fictitious companies, customers and other sample data.

• The big difference is that BBP is a much smaller data set.
  Instead of thousands of available customers or suppliers in IDES, BBP only contains a few dozen such data.

• IDES was available for the SAP R/3 and SAP ECC releases
  BBP is now included as of S/4 HANA

SAP IDES(Internet Demo & Evaluation System) consists of a set of basic configuration settings for all SAP standard modules and also contains large amounts of sample data (i.e. customers, suppliers, companies, transactions, etc.).

IDES was first published in 1995 and was available for the SAP R/3 and SAP ECC releases.
However, IDES no longer exists for the new SAP S/4 HANA system.
It has been replaced by SAP BBP, Business Best Practices.

BBP (Business Best Practices) packages are very similar to IDES - they also contain basic configuration settings and sample master data as well as sample transactions. The big difference is that BBP is a much smaller data set. Instead of 1000 available customers or suppliers in IDES, BBP contains only a few dozen such data.

SAP Best Practice (also known as SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions, SAP RDS) is a standardized content database to support implementation projects with executable business processes. They are based on the comprehensive and flexible model that the SAP Best Practices team has cultivated from implementations in more than 50 countries with well over 10,000 customers.

If we log into both systems, ECC & S/4 HANA, and look at company and customer data, for example, the difference becomes apparent:

IDES data in SAP ECC

BBP data in S/4 HANA

So we see that the large amount of sample data in IDES has been significantly reduced in BBP.
Perhaps SAP has realized that you don't necessarily need thousands of customer and company data - some selected sample data is probably enough to be able to test, try, learn and work in an SAP system.

What do you think?