SAP has agreed to acquire Dremio, an open data lakehouse platform, to strengthen SAP Business Data Cloud’s ability to connect SAP and non-SAP data for real-time analytics and AI workloads. The deal is aimed at one of the main barriers to enterprise AI adoption: fragmented data spread across proprietary formats, disconnected systems, and limited business context. SAP said Dremio will help create an Apache Iceberg-native enterprise lakehouse, allowing data from multiple sources to coexist on an open foundation without requiring movement or format conversion.
The deal centers on Dremio’s ability to act as a semantic bridge, feeding the SAP Knowledge Graph with organizational hierarchies and regulatory data. This integration ensures that AI agents can access unified relationships and lineage across every connected engine, whether proprietary or third-party. The platform utilizes Apache Polaris and the Apache Arrow project to provide a single point of access, effectively removing the engineering friction that typically stalls AI scaling.
SAP CTO Philipp Herzig noted that enterprise AI often fails because data is not prepared for autonomous agents, stating, “Dremio eliminates that bottleneck.” Following the close, SAP intends to maintain Dremio’s commitment to open-source projects, prioritizing contributions to the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API. This strategy allows the combined entity to offer a federated analytical reach combined with the real-time operational performance of the SAP HANA Cloud in-memory engine.