SAP Business Data Cloud & Dremio - A Quick Check
Getting a quick understanding while SAP intent to acquire Dremio
SAP just announced the intent to acquire Dremio. As I just made a comparision of SAP’s offering SAP Business Data Cloud and Dremio Data Lakehouse, I can give short insight what are those data technologies are about.
First - let’s have a look at SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP started SAP BDC a little bit more than 1 year ago to extend the SAP Datasphere data platform, also know as SAP Business Data Fabric. By cooperating with Databricks they created possiblities to use Databricks services (SAP Databricks) and integrate with native Databricks systems via zero copy approach.
Meanwhile SAP also announced similar cooperations with Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric (Q3/2026).
For the evaluation I did some months ago, we described SAP Business Data Cloud as follows:
About Dremio Data Lakehouse it is important to understand that Dremio is not a full stack offering. Dremio is essentially a query engine with strong integration and virtualisation capabilities. Typically you can find a combination of different components to design a full stack, like:
As one of the most important topics of todays Agentic AI is, to seamless access data wherever it resides, Dremio is here to serve you. In my latest evaluation we identified the following key features for Dremio:
So far I hope this quick check will help you to understand better the discussions coming up the next days. Feel free to read also about my take about the latest acquisition of Reltio - also in the context to support SAP’s AI strategy:
Feel free to let a comment here about your perspective on the planned acquisition.
I get so confused between Druid, Drill, Dremel, Dremio, Denodo...
Anyway the on-premise option with Dremio seems to be the main draw for SAP and for customers who never wanted critical ERP data in the cloud. No doubt there will be a flurry of investment in pre-built pipelines, data models and metadata for SAP data, like fact and dimension gold tables in Iceberg based on MARA. I assume Dremio then becomes an option only for customers with mostly SAP data, like the old SAP Business DWH. However, if that's the case it will fall behind in innovation relative to the industry leaders Databricks and Snowflake.