Analyst(s): Nick Patience
Publication Date: February 14, 2025
SAP and Databricks have announced SAP Business Data Cloud, whereby SAP brings together its data assets and combines them with Databricks cloud-based data warehouse platform to customers in its SAP RISE program. It’s a significant deal for both companies.
What is Covered in this Article:
- SAP and Databricks are launching SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), providing native accessibility to SAP data with intact semantics and context.
- SAP BDC combines SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse with Databricks as a first-party data service.
- The collaboration addresses key enterprise challenges around SAP data access, quality, and AI innovation.
- The partnership has strategic benefits for both companies, strengthening SAP’s cloud offerings and expanding Databricks’ enterprise reach.
The News: SAP and Databricks have announced a strategic partnership to launch SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), a SaaS data and analytics that involves SAP reselling Databricks’ data platform to customers embarking on SAP’s RISE program to move to the cloud. It marks a significant shift in how enterprises can access and utilize their SAP data for AI and analytics. SAP BDC combines SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse with Databricks as a first-party data service.
The partnership aims to address the complexity involved in combining SAP data with other enterprise data, which is especially relevant in the age of AI. SAP data contains some of the most valuable data within many large organizations and as they look to use that data to train or tune AI models it’s critical that it is accessible and usable. In some scenarios, SAP data semantics can be compromised, which BDC is designed to address.
SAP Databricks
This deal means SAP becomes a reseller of Databricks – an arrangement Databricks refers to as SAP Databricks – in a similar way that Microsoft already is, with some slight differences. This is for SAP RISE customers, not for SAP on-premises customers and is part of SAP’s drive to get more of its customers to move to the cloud. SAP will determine pricing and any discounts.
Importantly, the partnership preserves existing investments: current Databricks customers who are successfully extracting SAP data through other methods will not be disrupted, as the partnership focuses on enabling new workloads and use cases.
The integration architecture leverages Delta Sharing for zero-copy data exchange, so data can remain in place but be used to build data pipelines for AI models and applications. And Databricks Unity Catalog ensures consistent data security and governance across both platforms. SAP Datasphere, a cloud-based data warehouse launched in 2023, will be subsumed into BDC, rather than be offered separately.
SAP and Databricks Launch SAP Business Data Cloud
Analyst Take: This partnership represents a significant strategic move for both companies. For SAP, it strengthens its RISE program and cloud transformation story. For SAP customers, it enables them to integrate their SAP data with non-SAP data using a zero-copy approach. While for Databricks, it provides privileged access to SAP’s vast enterprise customer base and their valuable data assets and bolsters its business ahead of an anticipated IPO this year.
What to Watch:
- Enterprise adoption patterns, particularly among existing Databricks customers who currently extract SAP data through other methods.
- Market response to SAP’s pricing and packaging of BDC’s “Capacity Units” model.
- Competitive responses from other data platform providers, notably Snowflake.
- Integration effectiveness across different cloud platforms as the solution rolls out to AWS, GCP, and Azure.
- Customer reception of the combined offering’s AI capabilities, particularly for enterprises looking to build domain-specific AI applications.
See the press release on SAP Business Data Cloud on the SAP website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Nick Patience is VP and Practice Lead for AI Platforms at The Futurum Group. Nick is a thought leader on AI development, deployment, and adoption - an area he has researched for 25 years. Before Futurum, Nick was a Managing Analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, responsible for 451 Research’s coverage of Data, AI, Analytics, Information Security, and Risk. Nick became part of S&P Global through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, a pioneering analyst firm that Nick co-founded in 1999. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor, known for his expertise in the drivers of AI adoption, industry use cases, and the infrastructure behind its development and deployment. Nick also spent three years as a product marketing lead at Recommind (now part of OpenText), a machine learning-driven eDiscovery software company. Nick is based in London.
