Introduction
SAP is the backbone of enterprise operations, powering mission-critical processes across 26 industries and 12 lines of business. Yet, despite its immense value, organizations often struggle to harness SAP data effectively – facing challenges with accessibility, integration, and real-time insights.
The rise of AI is reshaping how businesses leverage data. By 2026, an estimated 80% of enterprises will have generative AI in production – up from less than 5% in 2023. To stay competitive, businesses must ensure their SAP data is not only accessible, but also high-quality and AI-ready.
That’s why today’s announcement of the SAP and Databricks partnership is a game-changer. This collaboration will streamline access to SAP data, accelerate time to value, and unlock new opportunities for AI-driven innovation – helping enterprises turn their data into a true competitive advantage.
SAP is the Heart of Enterprise Operations
SAP houses mission-critical data across finance, HR, supply chain, sales, and more. This data is not just essential for day-to-day operations – it’s the foundational input for modern analytics and AI-driven decision-making.
SAP data can power a wide range of high-impact use cases, including:
- Supply Chain Optimization: Enhancing efficiency by improving visibility into procurement, logistics, and vendor performance.
- Demand Planning and Forecasting: Leveraging historical and real-time data to anticipate customer needs and market trends.
- Inventory Management: Reducing waste and ensuring optimal stock levels through intelligent tracking and automation.
- Production Optimization: Increasing manufacturing efficiency with data-driven insights that reduce downtime and improve resource allocation.
- Predictive Maintenance: Preventing equipment failures before they happen by analyzing machine performance and sensor data.
- Patient Care Optimization: Enhancing treatment plans with AI-driven insights from patient records, lab results, and wearable device data.
- Clinical Trial Optimization: Identifying suitable candidates and improving efficiency in drug development through data analytics.
- Fraud Monitoring and Detection: Using AI-driven anomaly detection to analyze financial transactions and identify fraudulent activity in real time.
- AI-Powered Underwriting: Leveraging historical SAP data combined with external risk factors to improve underwriting models, enhance risk assessment, and streamline approval processes.
From operational efficiency to AI-driven innovation, SAP data is at the core of business success. The challenge, however, is making this data more accessible, integrated, and actionable – which is exactly where the SAP and Databricks partnership comes in.
Databricks is the Brain Bringing AI-Driven Intelligence to SAP Data
Integrate SAP and Non-SAP Data, no ETL Required
To achieve maximum ROI on these use cases, it’s often necessary to integrate SAP data with non-SAP data. These non-SAP sources could be anything from CRMs like Salesforce or Zendesk, to IoT data generated from machine sensors on a manufacturing floor. Databricks allows a seamless integration of these data products, regardless of the source. Databricks can ingest data from SAP Analytics Cloud, BW/4 PCE, or Datasphere using a zero-copy Delta Sharing approach, so that this data is curated, context rich, and ready for analytics and AI use cases.
With this approach, organizations benefit from:
- Faster Time to Insights: Access and analyze SAP and non-SAP data in real time.
- A Single Source of Truth: Eliminate data duplication and inconsistencies by keeping data centralized, context-rich, and analytics-ready.
- AI and Advanced Analytics Enablement: Provide data scientists and business users with fully governed, integrated datasets to drive AI models, predictive analytics, and real-time decision-making.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Effortlessly connect new data sources without re-engineering complex ETL workflows.
By breaking down data silos and enabling seamless data sharing, Databricks empowers enterprises to drive greater ROI from their AI, analytics, and business intelligence initiatives—without the traditional ETL bottlenecks.
Maintain Trust and Data Quality with Unity Catalog
One of the key advantages of bringing SAP data into Databricks is the ability to enforce consistent, enterprise-grade data governance through Unity Catalog. Managing access to SAP data has traditionally been complex, with fragmented policies across different teams and tools. Unity Catalog solves this challenge by providing a centralized, intelligent, and automated approach to data governance and access control across all data products.
With Unity Catalog, organizations can:
- Ensure Secure, Granular Access Control: Implement fine-grained permissions across SAP and non-SAP data sources, ensuring the right users have access to the right data.
- Enable AI and Analytics at Scale: Data scientists building AI models, analysts working with BI dashboards, and business users making data-driven decisions all benefit from consistent, governed access to SAP data.
- Enhance Data Lineage and Asset Discovery: Automatically track where data comes from, how it transforms over time, and where it’s used, giving teams better visibility and trust in their data.
- Unify Business Logic and Metadata: Maintain centralized documentation of business definitions, rules, and transformations, reducing duplication and improving alignment across teams.
By integrating SAP data with Databricks and leveraging Unity Catalog, enterprises can break down silos, improve compliance, and accelerate AI and analytics innovation—all while ensuring governance and security at scale.
Use Databricks to Power your SAP Data with AI
The SAP and Databricks partnership unlocks the full potential of SAP data for AI-driven insights and automation. By combining SAP’s rich, structured enterprise data with Databricks’ cutting-edge AI and machine learning capabilities, organizations can build domain-specific, agentic systems that drive smarter decision-making and improved business outcomes.
With Databricks, enterprises can:
- Combine Structured and Unstructured Data for AI: Unify SAP’s structured data with unstructured sources like emails, documents, and IoT signals to create richer AI-driven insights.
- Build Cost-Effective, Custom GenAI Solutions: Train and deploy domain-specific Generative AI models tailored to business needs, without excessive costs or complexity.
- Improve AI and Analytics Quality: Leverage high-quality, governed SAP data to enhance model accuracy, ensuring AI outputs are more relevant, actionable, and trustworthy.
- Enable Real-Time AI Workflows: Process and analyze SAP data in real time to support use cases like predictive analytics, intelligent automation, and AI-powered decision support.
By integrating SAP data into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, enterprises can move beyond traditional analytics and tap into AI-powered innovation, delivering faster insights, greater automation, and a stronger competitive edge.
SAP + Databricks: AI-Ready Data and Real-Time Insights
The SAP and Databricks partnership marks a new era of innovation, making SAP data more accessible, integrated, and AI-ready than ever before. By combining SAP’s mission-critical enterprise data with Databricks’ powerful analytics and AI capabilities, organizations can:
- Break down data silos and seamlessly integrate SAP with non-SAP data – without complex ETL.
- Ensure secure, governed access to SAP data with Unity Catalog.
- Accelerate AI-driven insights by leveraging structured and unstructured data for domain-specific intelligence.
- Drive real-time decision-making and maximize the value of SAP data across analytics and AI use cases.
However, realizing these benefits requires the right expertise – both in SAP’s complex data landscape and in AI-driven analytics with Databricks. Partnering with experts who understand both worlds is key to unlocking true business value.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your SAP data with Databricks? Lovelytics has the expertise to seamlessly migrate your SAP workloads to Databricks, enabling real-time analytics, AI-driven insights, and enhanced scalability. Let’s transform your data into a strategic advantage—contact us to get started!
Let’s build the future of enterprise AI – together.
