SAP agrees to acquire Dremio in data platform push
Wed, 6th May 2026 (Today)
SAP has agreed to acquire Dremio, adding the company's data lakehouse technology to its data portfolio.
Financial terms were not disclosed, and the transaction remains subject to regulatory approval. SAP expects the acquisition to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to customary conditions.
The proposed purchase focuses on how companies combine data held inside SAP systems with information stored on other platforms. Dremio's software will sit alongside SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud, with the aim of letting customers analyse SAP and non-SAP data together without moving it into proprietary formats.
Dremio's platform is built around Apache Iceberg, an open table format used for large-scale analytics. SAP Business Data Cloud will become an Apache Iceberg-native enterprise lakehouse, allowing SAP and non-SAP data to sit on the same foundation while analytical tools query data across different sources.
Dremio will also support a universal catalogue in SAP Business Data Cloud based on Apache Polaris and the Apache Iceberg REST Catalogue API. SAP said the catalogue will serve as a common access point for data definitions, relationships, access rights and lineage across connected engines.
Businesses have struggled to turn artificial intelligence projects into operational systems when underlying data is fragmented across departments and software estates. SAP presented the acquisition as a response to that problem, arguing that data integration and governance issues have slowed the use of AI systems in business processes.
Philipp Herzig, SAP's chief technology officer, set out that view in a statement on the deal.
"Enterprise AI doesn't stall because the models aren't good enough; it stalls because the data isn't ready for AI agents. 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," Herzig said.
Open data
The acquisition also signals SAP's continued push towards open data standards, as large software groups try to reassure customers that information can be used across mixed technology estates. Dremio has been involved in several open-source projects, including Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris and Apache Arrow, and SAP said it will continue to invest in those efforts after the deal closes.
Dremio has positioned its software around federated queries, which let users analyse data from multiple systems without building separate ETL pipelines to move it first. SAP said this approach will help customers combine data sources more directly for analytics and AI workloads, while using SAP HANA Cloud for real-time transactions and operational processing.
SAP also pointed to the economics of analytics infrastructure as part of the rationale for the purchase. Dremio's platform is designed to run in a serverless, elastic model, scaling up when demand rises and down when activity eases, which can reduce the need for fixed capacity planning.
AI strategy
The transaction fits into SAP's broader effort to expand its business AI and data offerings. SAP Business Data Cloud is intended to bring together data management, governance and semantic context, while HANA Cloud remains the company's in-memory database platform for transactional and analytical workloads.
By adding Dremio, SAP is seeking to strengthen the layer that connects different data sources and makes them available to analytical systems and AI tools. The resulting architecture, SAP said, would provide a single business context across systems, including organisational relationships, regulatory classifications and cross-system lineage.
Dremio has built its market position around open formats and cloud-based analytics rather than closed data warehouses. It says its customers include large organisations in sectors such as energy, banking and manufacturing, reflecting demand for data platforms that can work across several cloud services and legacy systems.
SAP did not disclose how Dremio will be integrated organisationally after the acquisition closes. It also did not provide a purchase price, leaving investors and industry observers without a clear measure of how much value SAP is placing on data infrastructure that supports analytics and AI across mixed software environments.
What is clear is that SAP sees control over data access, structure and governance as central to the next phase of enterprise software competition.