July 08, 2026

SAP Confirms Dremio Acquisition, Powering AI Agents With Its Data Lakehouse Platform

SAP confirmed this week that it has closed its acquisition of Dremio, the data lakehouse specialist it first agreed to buy back in May. Terms weren’t disclosed, and the transaction had been sitting through regulatory review since. The logic behind it, though, was laid out candidly at the time.

“Enterprise AI doesn’t stall because the models aren’t good enough; it stalls because the data isn’t ready for AI agents,” said Philipp Herzig, CTO at SAP SE. “Dremio eliminates that bottleneck.”

“Combined with SAP Business Data Cloud, we can now take customers from raw, fragmented data to governed, AI-ready intelligence on a single open platform.”

Dremio’s tech now slots into SAP Business Data Cloud. This affords native support for Apache Iceberg, the open table format that’s becoming a shared language for the data industry. In practice, that means SAP customers can query non-SAP data, such as a CRM, a regional supply chain system, and whatever else is bolted onto the estate. They can also do so without shipping it somewhere else first or converting it into a format SAP recognises.

SAP HANA Cloud still handles the real-time transactional side. Dremio’s job is to federate everything sitting around it. It does so on infrastructure that scales itself up and down rather than sitting provisioned and idle. There’s a governance layer bundled in, too. There is an open catalogue, built on Apache Polari. This tracks who can see what, where data came from, and how it relates to everything else in the business. SAP wants that catalogue to become the spine of its wider Knowledge Graph. Effectively, this is the reference an AI agent checks before it’s allowed to act on anything.

The Market Read on the Dremio Acquisition

Databricks, Snowflake and Google Cloud have all built recent strategies around Iceberg, for much the same reason SAP now has. Open table formats are turning into table stakes for anyone selling AI infrastructure, not a point of difference. What’s slightly more unusual is SAP, a company with a long history of keeping customers inside its own walls, buying its way into an ecosystem it doesn’t fully control.

Dremio built an independent customer base, including Shell, TD Bank and Michelin, precisely because it wasn’t owned by an applications vendor. SAP has promised to keep contributing to Iceberg, Polaris and Arrow as open-source projects. Whether that holds is something worth watching over the next year.

What it Means for SAP Customers and CX Leaders

If your organisation already runs SAP alongside half a dozen other systems, the near-term change is modest but tangible. There are slightly better odds that your next AI pilot survives contact with actual data. That is, of course, assuming your account team can eventually tell you what this costs since SAP hasn’t published pricing yet.

If you don’t run SAP, it’s still worth considering, however. Not necessarily because this one deal changes much on its own, but because it’s another data point in a conspicuous pattern. The AI conversation is evolving to focus on the data platform underpinning the baseline tech itself.”

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