SAP has announced plans to acquire Dremio, an agentic lakehouse company, for an undisclosed price. The key differentiator driving the deal is Dremio's ability to query and federate enterprise data in place — without requiring data movement or format conversion — using Apache Iceberg as an open table format foundation. This addresses a critical gap for SAP's enterprise customers, whose data landscapes are typically fragmented across legacy warehouses, departmental lakes, and on-prem systems. Analysts note that acquiring Snowflake or Databricks was never realistic due to cost and neutrality concerns, as Dremio lets SAP sit above the warehouse layer and interoperate with both platforms. The acquisition is also seen as correcting SAP's earlier failure to develop native Apache Iceberg capabilities. Analysts advise CIOs with active Snowflake/Databricks contracts to watch for SAP steering new AI workloads toward Business Data Cloud by 2027.
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