SAP SE finalized the acquisition of Dremio, an open data lakehouse platform utilized by organizations including Shell, TD Bank and Michelin. The transaction integrates Dremio’s serverless architecture into the SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud offerings. This combination allows customers to merge proprietary SAP information with external data sources to run analytical workflows.
The technical integration addresses a structural challenge in artificial intelligence deployments, where projects fail when underlying data remains fragmented or locked in proprietary formats. Through the acquired technology, the SAP Business Data Cloud operates as an Apache Iceberg-native environment. Apache Iceberg functions as an open table format that allows different data types to coexist on a single foundation, eliminating the requirement for data movement or format conversion.
“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 purchase, SAP will deliver a universal catalog built on Apache Polaris and the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API. This tool acts as the semantic layer for the SAP Business Data Cloud, providing connected engines with a central access point for data lineage and access rights. The catalog forms the infrastructure for the SAP Knowledge Graph, a system that tracks organizational hierarchies and regulatory classifications as native properties.
The Dremio platform features an elastic infrastructure that scales automatically during demand spikes to process federated queries without ETL pipelines. The acquired company operates as a contributor to the Apache Iceberg project and co-created Apache Arrow alongside Apache Polaris. SAP confirmed it will continue investing in these open-source initiatives to support enterprise analytics.
