Databricks announced the launch of 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 maximise 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 organisation 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.
“Generative AI is a catalyst for reinvention across the enterprise, but to build and scale AI applications effectively, organisations need to have a complete understanding of their data,” said Karthik Narain, Group Chief Executive – Technology and CTO, Accenture. “We’re working closely with SAP and Databricks to help our clients maximise the convenience of integrated and open data, draw better insights faster, create new personalisations and launch AI-based innovations.”
“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 maximise the value of AI for organisations 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.”
“Breaking down silos between structured and unstructured data is a crucial step in unlocking true value from data-driven AI investments – especially amid constant industry disruption,” said Jessica Kosmowski, Global Ecosystems and Alliances Leader and Principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP. “The new SAP Databricks offering can address that need for our shared clients, combining the power of the SAP business suite and Databricks with rich SAP data to drive business transformation and data modernisation.”
“EY is focused on helping clients connect data from across the enterprise to realise transformative business opportunities,” said EY-Databricks Alliance Leader Hugh Burgin. “We are excited to leverage the combined strengths of SAP and Databricks to transform data into trusted business insights’.
