Databricks Launches SAP Databricks, Targets Sprawling Data

Data and AI company Databricks has launched SAP Databricks, a strategic product and go-to-market partnership with SAP that will natively integrate the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform within the SAP Business Data Cloud.

New partnership combines data sources for many organizations

“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.”

Through this partnership, the two companies will combine the business data held within SAP and the Databricks platform for data warehousing, data engineering, and AI, all governed by the Databricks Unity Catalog.

“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.”

Recently, Databricks announced $15 billion in fundraising and intends to utilize $250 million to help make customers and system integrator partners successful with SAP Databricks across deployment and migrations to unlock the business value of SAP data.

SAP Databricks for domain-specific AI

This new offering allows customers to easily combine their SAP data with the rest of their enterprise data.

Bi-directional data sharing through Delta Sharing between their SAP Databricks environment and native Databricks (non-SAP) environment allows users to unify all their data without complicated data engineering. This dramatically increases the potential productivity of teams trying to innovate with their most valuable data.

“Generative AI is a catalyst for reinvention across the enterprise, but to build and scale AI applications effectively, organizations need to have a complete understanding of their data,” said Karthik Narain, the group chief executive – technology and CTO of Accenture. “We’re working closely with SAP and Databricks to help our clients maximize the convenience of integrated and open data, draw better insights faster, create new personalizations and launch AI-based innovations.”

Unity Catalog consistently governs and secures the entire data estate, allowing enterprises to build on a trusted foundation and conduct exploratory data science and SQL analytics at scale with a complete understanding of the business semantics.

Further, Mosaic AI capabilities allow companies to quickly develop domain-specific AI trained on their private SAP data, unlocking agent systems for their businesses’ most important functions.

“A strong data foundation remains the cornerstone of all successful AI integrations. SAP Databricks will enable clients to seamlessly merge ERP data with operational insights to maximize the value of AI for organizations and drive critical business benefits,” said Niraj Parihar, CEO of Insights and Data Global Business Line at Capgemini and member of the group executive committee. “The recent acquisition of Syniti reinforces Capgemini’s data-driven digital core business transformation services, notably large-scale SAP transformations. Combined with our long-standing partnership with SAP, Capgemini is expertly placed to drive intelligent decision-making for our clients.”

The development of AI applications in recent years has been heavily reliant on data governance for long-term success. Read more on this from Feroz Khan, co-founder of Bluestonex, a SaaS product creator focused on driving value in the SAP ecosystem.