Christian Klein, CEO of the software group SAP, during the annual press conference. Europe’s largest software manufacturer SAP is today announcing its figures for the past financial year.
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SAP is one of the world’s largest software companies. Databricks is among the fastest growing.
On Thursday, the two companies announced a partnership that will put Databricks’ data analysis technology alongside SAP’s human resources, finance and logistics software so that customers can more easily access and make sense of their most critical data.
“The way I think about it, the most important enterprise data on the planet today is actually SAP data, and now you are marrying it with the best data platform,” said Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, in an interview with CNBC. “For me, it’s a marriage made in heaven.”
Like the rest of the technology sector, SAP and Databricks have both been selling investors on the value of artificial intelligence.
In late January, SAP boosted its financial outlook for the year, fueled by AI. The stock is up 69% in the past year. Databricks, meanwhile, is privately held with a $62 billion valuation and is among the companies of greatest interest to Wall Street regarding a potential IPO.
Last month, Databricks said Meta had signed on as an investor. The two companies work together on the popular Llama open-source AI model, which Meta created.
Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi.
Databricks
SAP is calling the combined offering Business Data Cloud. CEO Christian Klein told CNBC that, “We are opening up the business data of SAP and we are matching non-SAP data to it with Databricks.”
The product will be available on cloud services from Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Klein said SAP’s Joule AI assistant will operate across the different functions in conjunction with AI agents, helping customers understand how external factors like weather, tariffs or policy shifts could affect their business.
“Every company today sees the massive potential for AI, and now every company is also facing the same challenge, data silos,” Klein said.
In fiscal 2024, SAP reported that 41% of revenue came from its cloud enterprise resource planning suite, with 33% growth year over year. Klein said the integration of Databricks has the potential to accelerate that growth.
Ghodsi said Databricks has earmarked about $250 million to invest “in migrations to the SAP network,” and predicted that the integration will drive $1 billion of revenue for the company in the next few years.
“When we talk to our customers they tell us again and again and again, ‘We need that SAP data,'” Ghodsi said.
WATCH: Databricks CEO on partnership with SAP
