Databricks and SAP deepen enterprise data and AI integration

Databricks and SAP announced an expansion of their data and AI partnership, pairing SAP Application Data Foundation with a broader set of Databricks capabilities inside SAP Databricks. The companies say the arrangement will give customers a more direct way to use governed SAP application data for analytics and AI across cloud and on-premises systems.

The announcement separates products available today from capabilities still on the roadmap. SAP Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks are available now. Databricks describes its Genie assistant, Lakeflow, Unity Gateway and Lakebase as coming to SAP Databricks, without giving general-availability dates, preview status, regional coverage or pricing. The official announcements also do not specify when Application Data Foundation will become available.

SAP says Application Data Foundation will make data from SAP applications available to a customer’s chosen processing engine in SAP Business Data Cloud, including SAP Databricks. SAP data products can then be shared through SAP BDC Connect using zero-copy access, which lets systems work with shared data without building another pipeline or creating another stored copy.

Databricks says the expanded access will cover SAP application data in both cloud and on-premises environments. Its example has a company bringing historical order data from an on-premises SAP ECC system into SAP Databricks, then retaining that work while migrating to the cloud. Customers can work with the data in the SAP-managed Databricks environment or use SAP BDC Connect to share governed SAP data products with an existing Databricks deployment.

The companies’ capability lists do not fully match. SAP names Lakeflow, Agent Bricks, Unity Gateway and Lakebase as additions being brought to SAP Databricks, while Databricks names Genie instead of Agent Bricks. Neither announcement explains the difference or establishes whether both AI products are planned for the service.

A separate integration between Databricks’ Genie assistant and SAP’s Joule assistant is also planned, not currently available. Databricks says a bidirectional connection could let people receive answers and take actions based on SAP context from within SAP applications, but it provides no delivery date.

SAP and Databricks attribute lower total cost of ownership, faster time to value, and fewer pipelines, copies and data silos to Application Data Foundation and SAP BDC Connect. The announcements do not provide comparative cost or deployment-time measurements for those claims.

Databricks also says SAF-Holland uses SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Databricks to unify more than 100 million customer, delivery and material records. According to the company, SAF-Holland now produces analyses five times faster than with traditional reporting, reducing work that took weeks to minutes. Databricks does not disclose a benchmark method or an independently validated baseline for that performance claim.

SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks became generally available across all cloud platforms in October 2025. It uses Delta Sharing for live, bidirectional, zero-copy sharing between an SAP Business Data Cloud environment and an existing Databricks instance. The companies have not disclosed release dates for the newly announced SAP Databricks capabilities.