SAP takes a further step in its data strategy by announcing the acquisition of Dremio, a software maker specialized in data lakehouse platforms. Its technology is built around Apache Arrow and Apache Iceberg, enabling faster analytical queries on distributed data.
With this acquisition, SAP gains a platform capable of federating heterogeneous data sources without duplication, a critical challenge for its customers facing the proliferation of cloud and hybrid environments.
Strengthening the SAP Datasphere Offering
Integrating Dremio should primarily benefit SAP Datasphere, the group’s data management and governance platform. SAP has been pursuing for several years a unified layer to exploit data coming from its applications (S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, etc.) as well as from third-party systems.
Dremio could thus deliver faster analytical performance on large data volumes, better support for open formats such as Apache Iceberg, and easier data access for BI tools and AI workloads.
The objective is to position SAP as a central player in modern data architectures, facing competitors such as Snowflake, Databricks or Google BigQuery.
This acquisition is also part of SAP’s overarching artificial intelligence strategy, notably with Joule, its generative copilot. Rapid, reliable and governed data access is a prerequisite for effectively training and deploying AI models.
By integrating Dremio’s technologies, SAP aims to reduce data access latency for AI use cases, improve the quality and traceability of datasets, and facilitate the deployment of unified data/AI pipelines.
A response to competitive pressure
The data lakehouse market is currently dominated by cloud-native players such as Databricks, which has heavily invested in open formats and performance optimization. At the same time, Snowflake is strengthening its capabilities around semi-structured data and AI.
With Dremio, SAP intends to stay competitive on the data layer, a domain that has become strategic for retaining its major customers and winning new ones.
If the financial terms of the deal have not been officially disclosed, the integration of Dremio is expected to proceed gradually. SAP could retain the team and technology as a key component of its data platform, while aligning it with its cloud ecosystem.
Ultimately, this acquisition could enable SAP to offer a more open and higher-performing alternative to traditional data architectures, while reinforcing its positioning on large-scale analytics and AI use cases.
