SAP Expands Business Data Cloud with Planned Acquisition of Dremio

SAP SE has announced an agreement to acquire Dremio, an open, high‑performance data lakehouse platform designed to accelerate agentic AI and enhance SAP Business Data Cloud’s ability to unify SAP and non‑SAP data for real‑time analytics and AI workloads.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and the acquisition remains subject to regulatory approval.

The move addresses a core challenge facing enterprise AI adoption: data fragmentation. Many AI initiatives fail not due to model limitations, but because enterprise data is siloed, locked in proprietary formats, and disconnected from the business context required for meaningful outcomes. These issues often lead to pilots that cannot scale, costly integration work, duplicated engineering effort, and governance challenges, particularly when organisations are unable to explain how AI-driven decisions are made.

By acquiring Dremio, SAP aims to reduce data integration friction and complement its existing SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud offerings. The combined capabilities are intended to deliver seamless integration across SAP and non‑SAP data environments, improving performance and lowering costs while accelerating AI readiness and time‑to‑value.

“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, 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.”

Following the acquisition, SAP Business Data Cloud will evolve into an Apache Iceberg‑native enterprise lakehouse. As an industry‑standard open table format, Apache Iceberg will form the foundational layer, enabling SAP and non‑SAP data to coexist without the need for data movement or format conversion. This approach supports federated analytics across enterprise data sources, while SAP HANA Cloud continues to deliver in‑memory performance for real‑time transactions and operational workloads.

Dremio’s serverless and elastic architecture is also expected to significantly improve the economics of enterprise analytics. The platform dynamically scales resources based on demand, expanding during peak usage and contracting during quieter periods, eliminating the need for fixed capacity planning while maintaining high performance.

In addition, SAP will introduce a universal, open data catalogue built on Apache Polaris and the Apache Iceberg REST Catalogue API. This catalogue will act as the discovery and semantic layer for SAP Business Data Cloud, providing a single access point to shared business context across all connected SAP and non‑SAP engines. It will capture meaning, relationships, access controls, and data lineage, and will underpin the SAP Knowledge Graph by embedding organisational hierarchies, regulatory classifications, and cross‑system lineage as native attributes.

Dremio is a key contributor to open‑source projects central to its platform, including Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris and Apache Arrow. SAP has confirmed its commitment to continued investment in and stewardship of these open‑source initiatives.

The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2026, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.