SAP to acquire Dremio, betting on open data to fuel enterprise AI
What's the deal? SAP has agreed to acquire Dremio, an open data lakehouse platform, to bolster its ability to unify SAP and non-SAP data for AI workloads. Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026, pending regulatory approval.
Dremio's platform is built on Apache Iceberg, the open-source table format that has become an industry standard. The acquisition will fold Dremio into SAP Business Data Cloud, giving the German software giant a serverless, elastic analytics engine that scales on demand.
Why now? Enterprise AI projects keep failing — not because the models are bad, but because the data underneath them is fragmented and locked in proprietary formats. SAP chief technology officer Philipp Herzig put it bluntly: "Enterprise AI doesn't stall because the models aren't good enough; it stalls because the data isn't ready for AI agents."
As companies race to deploy agentic AI — systems where AI agents act autonomously across business processes — having clean, governed, context-rich data becomes a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have. Dremio's lakehouse eliminates the need to move or convert data between formats, letting SAP and non-SAP data sit on the same open foundation.
What could go wrong? Integration is the classic stumbling block for enterprise acquisitions. Merging Dremio's open-source-first culture with SAP's vast, sometimes rigid product ecosystem won't be trivial. Customers of both companies will watch closely to see whether Dremio's flexibility survives inside a larger organisation.
SAP said it is "fully committed" to continuing Dremio's contributions to Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris, and Apache Arrow. But open-source communities have seen such promises before — and broken ones tend to push developers toward alternatives.
Regulatory approval is another variable. While this isn't the kind of mega-deal that typically draws prolonged scrutiny, the current climate around tech consolidation means nothing is guaranteed.
The signal: Dremio, classified as a late-growth-stage company on Dealroom, is being absorbed by SAP at a moment when the data lakehouse category is consolidating fast — Databricks, also at the late-growth stage, has been on its own aggressive acquisition and expansion spree. SAP's move suggests that incumbent enterprise software giants now view open lakehouse infrastructure not as a complementary add-on but as a core strategic asset, narrowing the runway for independent players in the space to remain standalone.
Read more: news.sap.com
