Reshaping Enterprise AI and Analytics

February 2025 — SAP SE and Databricks have announced a landmark partnership to launch SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), a new SaaS data and analytics platform that brings SAP's core data assets together with Databricks' cloud-based data intelligence platform. The move is positioned as a significant milestone in SAP's RISE with SAP program, designed to accelerate customer cloud adoption, while extending Databricks' reach into SAP's vast enterprise ecosystem.

The News

SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) provides native access to SAP data while preserving its semantics and context, a longstanding challenge for enterprises. By combining SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Business Warehouse with Databricks as a first-party data service, BDC makes SAP data easier to integrate, govern, and use for AI-driven applications.

As part of the deal, SAP will resell Databricks' platform under the name "SAP Databricks" to RISE customers migrating to the cloud. On-premises SAP customers are not included in this offering. SAP will control pricing and packaging, including discounts under its "capacity units" licensing model.

Why it matters

For enterprises, SAP data represents some of the most valuable and business-critical information. Yet combining it with other data sources has often been complex, error-prone, and risky—especially when AI models require consistent semantics and governance. BDC addresses this by:

  • Preserving SAP data context during integration
  • Enabling zero-copy data sharing via Delta Sharing, reducing duplication and movement
  • Ensuring consistent governance and security with Databricks Unity Catalog
  • Supporting AI workloads and domain-specific applications directly from trusted SAP data

This collaboration helps SAP strengthen its RISE program by making cloud migration more compelling, while giving Databricks privileged access to SAP's enterprise customer base—a key growth lever ahead of its anticipated IPO.

SAP Databricks: A Reseller Arrangement

The partnership effectively makes SAP a reseller of Databricks, similar to Databricks' existing relationship with Microsoft, though tailored to SAP's RISE customers. Importantly, existing Databricks customers who already integrate SAP data independently will not be disrupted. Instead, the focus is on enabling new cloud-based workloads and AI use cases within the SAP ecosystem.

Technical Foundation

SAP Business Data Cloud builds on SAP Datasphere (launched in 2023), which will now be subsumed into BDC rather than offered separately. Its architecture is designed for scale, flexibility, and AI enablement:

  • Delta Sharing allows zero-copy integration between SAP and non-SAP data sources
  • Databricks Unity Catalog enforces consistent governance across data pipelines
  • AI Model Readiness: SAP Joule, the company's generative AI copilot, will leverage BDC as a trusted data backbone, while enterprises can build their own domain-specific AI models on top of the platform

Outlook

SAP Business Data Cloud is more than just a product launch—it's a signal of how enterprise data strategy is shifting in the AI era. By bringing SAP's mission-critical business data together with Databricks' data intelligence capabilities, the two companies are setting the stage for enterprises to accelerate cloud transformation, unlock new AI use cases, and strengthen governance in a rapidly evolving competitive landscape.


See the press release on SAP Business Data Cloud on the SAP website.

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