SAP has snapped up Dremio, a data integration and analytics provider, to extend the reach of its data analytics and AI agent-building tools into external data sources.
The ERP giant spent an undisclosed sum on the Iceberg-based lakehouse biz in a bid to help its customers eliminate data fragmentation and improve integration. The purchase will, according to SAP, complement its data warehouse and analytics platform, Business Data Cloud, and SAP HANA Cloud.
In a statement, SAP said the Business Data Cloud will become an "Apache Iceberg-native enterprise lakehouse that unifies SAP and non-SAP data to power agentic AI at enterprise scale."
Apache Iceberg is an open table format that originated at Netflix. It has a rival in Databricks' Delta Lake format – open source under the Linux Foundation – although Databricks has moved to make the standards more interoperable since its acquisition of Tabular, a company founded by Iceberg's original authors. In both formats, the promise is to bring analytics to the data, without the cost and effort of moving it, helping to underpin enterprise analytics, machine learning, and AI agent development.
SAP claims Apache Iceberg is the industry-standard open table format, and the Business Data Cloud will natively support it "as its foundation," meaning no data movement or format conversion is necessary.
SAP has been here before. About three years ago, then-CTO Juergen Mueller pledged to help customers "easily and confidently integrate SAP data with non-SAP data from third-party applications and platforms," supported by its partnership with Databricks, the data lake and machine learning vendor.
Last year, it deepened ties with Databricks to support bidirectional data sharing between SAP Business Data Cloud and third-party data platforms, with Databricks' Delta Lake open table format "as the initial delivery." The setup used Databricks' Delta Sharing, which was initially based on the Delta format, although the company has more recently announced support for Iceberg.
Dremio was valued at $2 billion during a $160 million funding round in 2022. Whatever SAP paid for the vendor, it obviously felt it was worth the money to get more tech based on the Iceberg open table format, which is repeatedly emphasized in the announcement. It might leave some wondering what it was not getting from the Databricks partnership.
The Register has asked SAP for further comment.
SAP said the Dremio lakehouse platform would "vastly improve the economics of enterprise analytics," offering a serverless and elastic approach without fixed capacity to provision or performance ceiling.
With the acquisition, SAP will give customers an open catalog built on Apache Polaris and the open Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API, to create a discovery and semantic layer for SAP Business Data Cloud. It promises "a single point of access to unified business context: meaning, relationships, access rights, and data lineage" across enterprise data outside SAP. ®
Source: The register