Snowflake & SAP unite to offer real-time AI data integration
SAP TechEd, taking place this November 4-6 in Berlin, saw SAP further emphasise its commitment to creating an open ecosystem in support of meeting developers where they are and empowering AI development.
As part of this commitment came a long awaited announcement for some - a new partnership with Snowflake that will bring Snowflake's fully managed data and AI capabilities to SAP customers.
SAP BDC and Snowflake
First off the line is a SAP Snowflake solution extension for SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). Set to be generally available in Q1 2026, the extension aims to provide organisations with the flexibility to choose the right compute and storage for each data and AI workload, all while maintaining governance, interoperability and business context.
With the expanded integration, customers can publish SAP data products from the BDC catalog directly into Snowflake Horizon and vice versa. Notably, it preserves the original business semantics, lineage and governance from BDC, providing detailed tracking of data usage, ownership and compliance. Customers can simplify their data landscape and extend their business data fabric using enterprise-grade Snowflake capabilities supported by SAP. The integration goes a long way in enabling developers to build tailored agents and intelligent applications grounded in mission-critical business data.
In addition, SAP BDC Connect, planned to be generally available in H1 2026, enables secure, bi-directional, zero-copy sharing of SAP's data products into customers' existing data lakes and platforms. Enterprises already using Snowflake can leverage SAP BDC Connect to integrate their existing instances of Snowflake with SAP BDC.
Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake, comments, "By tightly integrating SAP and Snowflake, we're making it simple for enterprises to connect their critical business data with its rich context in SAP with the power of seamless AI app and data agent development at scale in Snowflake. Enterprises can now innovate faster with Snowflake and SAP BDC and seamlessly share data between the platforms - zero-copy and fully governed."
Committing to an open data ecosystem
This latest announcement brings Snowflake into the open data ecosystem of SAP BDC, which is all aimed at empowering customers with greater openness and choice, bringing the cloud data platform's existing capabilities into SAP, and optimising total cost of ownership across workloads without sacrificing trust and security.
Irfan Khan, President and Chief Product Officer for SAP Data and Analytics, SAP SE, commented on the Snowflake partnership: "Bringing Snowflake to SAP Business Data Cloud empowers our customers with openness and choice. Together, we combine SAP's decades of leadership in mission-critical business applications with Snowflake's modern data platform to deliver a unified, enterprise-ready, and SAP-supported experience that extends the value of business data across the entire ecosystem."
On the broader motivation behind SAP's open ecosystem commitment, Khan comments, "It's a realisation that we need to get back to the fundamentals. Whilst we believe in the opinionated BTP stack of SAP, we also have to provide very explicit optionality to customers who, by definition, have already selected a Snowflake, a Databricks, a BigQuery or others. Given the nature of AI and the workloads of AI, you really need to have all the data accessible."
He continues, "Why is [having an open ecosystem] so important now? Because the world is highly heterogeneous, customer choice matters, and the existing investments need to be honoured - hence why we are making this very big open play now."
Databricks and Snowflake are just the beginning
The Snowflake announcement follows a recent Databricks integration release from February this year. Similiar to the Snowflake extension, with Databricks in BDC customers can connect all data from a single, unified experience; seamlessly connect to curated SAP data products to reduce data extraction and prep time; enable bidirectional, zero copy data sharing between SAP data and Databricks environments; and unify application, structured and unstructured data to accelerate advanced analytics and machine learning workloads.
On the potential of future partnerships, Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP and Product & Engineering Lead, comments, "This is our commitment to staying open from an ecosystem perspective. We have a very long list of partners that are excited and interested in being part of the BDC journey, both from a data sharing perspective, but then also to build applications on top of it, being able to enrich and extend the data model and the harmonised data model that's available in BDC. So we absolutely are committed to expanding our set of partnerships."
