SAP promises to open out data flows in both directions

SAP has announced new ways to share enterprise data across platforms, including native support for Apache Iceberg and a broader partnership with Databricks. The changes aim to make analytics and AI tools more accessible to companies still running older SAP systems, without requiring them to upgrade their ERP first.

SAP’s Business Data Cloud will support Iceberg and an open catalogue, alongside existing support for Databricks’ Delta Lake, with zero-copy sharing across services including Snowflake, Google, AWS and Microsoft. A Dremio integration will also let users query several relational databases without moving their data. Databricks says the expanded partnership will help companies combine historical SAP data with other sources to build forecasting models, while SAP and Databricks plan to connect their Joule and Genie AI tools; analysts expect competition over which platform controls the business context used by AI.