SAP and Databricks Unveil Strategic Partnership for Seamless Data Integration

SAP and Databricks are announcing a new strategic partnership to address long-standing challenges SAP customers face in accessing and utilizing their SAP data, particularly for AI and modern data warehousing. The partnership introduces “SAP Databricks” as part of SAP’s Business Data Cloud (BDC) offering.

The key innovation is a zero-copy data access capability that allows customers to use SAP data while maintaining its semantics, without the expensive data engineering and movement traditionally required. This is achieved through a Delta Sharing bridge that works both within BDC and across to native Databricks.

SAP Databricks will include Mosaic AI, Databricks SQL, and Unity Catalog, but notably excludes AI BI (as SAP uses its own Analytics Cloud), some sophisticated data engineering capabilities (available in native Databricks), and Lakehouse Federation.

An important aspect is that this partnership doesn’t invalidate existing data extraction methods – it’s focused on new workloads. Customers may need both SAP Databricks and native Databricks depending on their needs. Those starting with SAP Databricks might eventually “graduate” to native Databricks for more sophisticated data engineering capabilities.

The solution requires customers to be on SAP RISE (cloud) and is not currently available for on-premises SAP installations. This aligns with SAP’s strategy to encourage cloud migration. This partnership leans in on making Databricks the choice for SAP customers looking to modernize their data architecture and implement AI capabilities.