Lily Sawyer is an in-house writer for EME Outlook Magazine, where she is responsible for interviewing corporate executives and crafting original features for the magazine, corporate...
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SAP has finalised its acquisition of Dremio, strengthening SAP Business Data Cloud with an open lakehouse platform designed to accelerate agentic AI, real-time analytics, and enterprise-wide data integration.
SAP has completed its acquisition of Dremio, marking a significant milestone in its strategy to strengthen enterprise AI capabilities through open, high-performance data infrastructure.
Originally announced in May 2026, the acquisition brings Dremio’s open data lakehouse platform into the SAP ecosystem, enhancing SAP Business Data Cloud and expanding customers’ ability to combine SAP and non-SAP data without the need for data movement or format conversion.
By addressing one of the biggest barriers to enterprise AI adoption – fragmented, disconnected data – SAP aims to help organisations accelerate analytical workloads and deploy AI at scale with greater efficiency and lower cost.
The acquisition also reinforces SAP’s commitment to open standards, positioning SAP Business Data Cloud as an Apache Iceberg-native enterprise lakehouse capable of supporting real-time analytics and agentic AI across increasingly complex business environments.
REMOVING DATA BARRIERS
Despite rapid advances in AI, many enterprise projects continue to struggle because organisations cannot effectively access, govern, or contextualise the data required to generate meaningful results.
According to SAP, fragmented data estates, proprietary formats, and disconnected systems often lead to duplicated engineering effort, slow integration of new data sources, limited scalability, and increased compliance risk when AI-generated decisions cannot be fully explained.
Dremio has been designed to eliminate much of this complexity by enabling organisations to query data wherever it resides without relying on traditional ETL pipelines or extensive data replication.
The platform will complement SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud, providing seamless integration across SAP and non-SAP environments while delivering the performance required for analytical and AI workloads in real time.
“Enterprise AI doesn’t stall because the models aren’t good enough; it stalls because the data isn’t ready for AI agents,” said Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP SE.
“Dremio eliminates that bottleneck. Combined with SAP Business Data Cloud, we can now take customers from raw, fragmented data to governed, AI-ready intelligence on a single open platform.”
BUILDING AN OPEN LAKEHOUSE
At the centre of the acquisition is Dremio’s Apache Iceberg-native architecture, which SAP intends to make the foundation of SAP Business Data Cloud.
Apache Iceberg has emerged as the industry-standard open table format, enabling organisations to store and manage data without becoming tied to proprietary technologies. By adopting this architecture natively, SAP will enable SAP and non-SAP data to coexist within a shared open foundation, eliminating the need for data movement or conversion before analytics or AI processing can begin.
This unified architecture will also combine federated analytical access across enterprise data sources with the in-memory capabilities of SAP HANA Cloud, supporting both operational performance and real-time transactional processing.
The result is intended to provide organisations with faster access to trusted data while simplifying the underlying infrastructure required to support enterprise-scale AI initiatives.
IMPROVING PERFORMANCE AND ECONOMICS
Alongside greater openness, the acquisition is expected to improve the economics of enterprise analytics.
Dremio’s serverless, elastic platform automatically scales computing resources in response to changing demand, allowing organisations to avoid provisioning fixed infrastructure while maintaining performance during periods of peak activity.
This approach reduces operational overhead and enables customers to run analytical and AI workloads more efficiently, particularly as data volumes and AI adoption continue to grow.
SAP also expects Dremio’s capabilities to accelerate time-to-value by reducing integration complexity and allowing organisations to prepare AI-ready data more quickly.
STRENGTHENING DATA GOVERNANCE
A further benefit of the acquisition lies in the creation of a universal, open data catalog built on Apache Polaris and the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API.
The catalog will act as both the discovery and semantic layer for SAP Business Data Cloud, giving SAP and non-SAP analytical engines access to shared business context, including relationships, meanings, access rights, and data lineage.
This capability will also underpin SAP’s Knowledge Graph, embedding organisational hierarchies, regulatory classifications, business relationships, and cross-system lineage directly into the platform.
By providing consistent governance and contextual understanding across enterprise data, SAP aims to improve transparency for AI applications while helping organisations satisfy increasingly stringent compliance requirements.
COMMITMENT TO OPEN SOURCE
The acquisition also reinforces SAP’s support for the open-source technologies that underpin modern data platforms.
Dremio has played a leading role in the development of Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris, and Apache Arrow, all of which have become central components of contemporary enterprise data architectures.
SAP has confirmed that it will continue investing in these projects and prioritise ongoing contributions to the open-source community.
With the transaction now complete, SAP has strengthened its ability to deliver an open, AI-ready data platform that combines business context, real-time analytics, and simplified data integration.
As organisations continue to scale agentic AI initiatives, the addition of Dremio provides SAP with an expanded foundation for helping customers unlock greater value from both SAP and non-SAP data, while maintaining the openness, governance, and performance increasingly required for enterprise AI success.
This article was produced by the editorial team at EME Outlook and published as part of the Outlook Publishing global network of B2B industry magazines.
Outlook Publishing delivers industry insights, company stories, and sector coverage across manufacturing, mining, construction, healthcare, supply chains, food production, and sustainability.
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Lily Sawyer is an in-house writer for EME Outlook Magazine, where she is responsible for interviewing corporate executives and crafting original features for the magazine, corporate brochures, and the digital platform.
