Databricks launches SAP Databricks

Databricks has launched SAP Databricks, a strategic product and go-to-market partnership with SAP that natively integrates the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform within the newly launched SAP Business Data Cloud. The partnership combines the most important business data that is in SAP with the Databricks platform for data warehousing, data engineering, and AI all governed by Databricks Unity Catalog. Databricks recently announced $15B in fundraising and intends to earmark a quarter of a billion dollars ($250M) to help make customers and system integrator partners successful with SAP Databricks across deployment and migrations, ultimately unlocking the tremendous business value of SAP data.

SAP applications power enterprises’ most important decisions around business planning, procurement, HR and travel management. Every enterprise wants to maximize the value of their SAP data by combining it with data from their other business-critical systems. Yet, those systems are varied, and many still sit on-premises in legacy platforms, making it difficult to develop advanced analytics and AI applications. SAP Databricks will have all the relevant datasets enriched and ready to be used for everything from data warehousing to building AI that can reason on that data.

“Every organization is searching for a faster, more reliable way to translate their data into strategic advantage,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-founder and CEO of Databricks. “Together with SAP, we’re helping businesses seamlessly unify their data sources, streamline analytics, and accelerate the development of domain-specific AI applications.”

“Our partnership with Databricks represents a turning point in how enterprise data is harnessed,” said Muhammad Alam, Executive Board Member at SAP. “Together, we’re fusing SAP’s proven expertise in mission-critical applications with Databricks’ cutting-edge data engineering and AI capabilities to help our customers unlock the next era of digital innovation.”

Databricks + SAP: Domain-specific AI

The power of SAP Databricks is that it allows customers to combine their SAP data with the rest of their enterprise data easily. Through bi-directional sharing of data via Delta Sharing between their SAP Databricks environment and their native Databricks (non-SAP) environment, they can unify all their data without complicated data engineering. This dramatically increases the productivity of teams trying to innovate with their most valuable data. The entire data estate is then consistently governed and secured with Unity Catalog so enterprises can build on a trusted foundation, allowing enterprises to conduct exploratory data science and SQL analytics at scale with a full understanding of the business semantics. Additionally, Mosaic AI capabilities will allow companies to easily develop domain-specific AI trained on their private SAP data to unlock agent systems for the most important functions in their businesses.