Databricks announced on October 30, 2026 that it is expanding its partnership with SAP, bringing the Genie, Lakeflow, Unity Gateway, and Lakebase capabilities to SAP Databricks within SAP Business Data Cloud and introducing a new SAP Application Data Foundation for accessing SAP application data.
Databricks framed the expansion around business context, saying today’s AI models still lack the context to understand how a company actually runs and that for most enterprises it lives in SAP systems. More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use SAP solutions, according to Databricks.
SAP published its own account of the expansion on October 29, 2026, at SAP TechEd Berlin, in a post by Irfan Khan, president and chief product officer of SAP Data & Analytics. SAP described the expanded scope as Lakeflow, Agent Bricks, Unity Gateway, and Lakebase coming to SAP Databricks in SAP Business Data Cloud, part of a broader set of lakehouse and business data fabric announcements.
Databricks and SAP launched SAP Databricks on February 13, 2025, a strategic product and go-to-market partnership that natively integrated the Databricks Data + AI Platform within the newly launched SAP Business Data Cloud. The offering, sold by SAP as part of SAP Business Data Cloud, was announced with a staged rollout on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and Databricks said it would earmark $250 million to help customers and system-integrator partners succeed with SAP Databricks deployments and migrations.
Since general availability, customers including Adidas, Zalando, Mondi, and CAF have used SAP Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks to analyze, govern, and build AI on live SAP Data Products through zero-copy, bi-directional OpenSharing, according to Databricks.
SAP Application Data Foundation
SAP Application Data Foundation makes data from SAP applications available for consumption in the SAP Business Data Cloud engine of choice, including SAP Databricks. SAP describes it as a cloud-native way to access SAP application data, saying it helps lower total cost of ownership and reduce time to value.
Databricks said accessing SAP application data has typically meant building and maintaining custom extraction pipelines that copy data, lose business context, and fragment governance. With the foundation, SAP data products can be shared with SAP BDC Connect for zero-copy access, avoiding additional pipelines, data copies, and silos, and data engineers can build models on SAP’s semantically rich business foundation so analytics and AI reflect how the business actually runs.
Databricks gave the example of a manufacturer running finance and supply chain on SAP ECC on-premises: while planning its move to the cloud, it can use SAP Application Data Foundation to bring years of order history into SAP Databricks, where data engineers can enrich the history with third-party data and build demand-forecasting models on SAP’s business semantics, keeping that work as they migrate.
Capabilities Coming to SAP Databricks
According to Databricks, the expanded partnership plans to bring the full range of its data and enterprise AI capabilities to SAP Databricks, embedded within SAP Business Data Cloud. Genie is described as an AI coworker that gives every team instant access to governed data and AI with enterprise context built in, delivering the context in core SAP data to every team and agent. A planned bi-directional integration between Genie and SAP’s Joule is intended to bring those answers and actions into SAP experiences.
Lakeflow is a unified data engineering solution to ingest, transform, and orchestrate data, so teams can build pipelines combining SAP data with IoT, CRM, and third-party sources. Unity Gateway provides multi-AI governance and cost control across agents, tools, models, and MCPs. Databricks describes Lakebase as the first serverless, mission-critical Postgres database built for AI apps and agents, aimed at operational data apps on SAP and enterprise data.
Governance and Go-to-Market Expansion
Databricks said Unity Catalog and Unity Gateway govern data, models, and agents across SAP and non-SAP data, and that customers can either use SAP data inside SAP Business Data Cloud with SAP Databricks or bring governed SAP data products into an existing Databricks estate, with any model on any cloud. The companies are also expanding their go-to-market partnership with joint teams in the field to help joint customers accelerate AI transformation, Databricks said.
“Data is the foundation for enterprise AI,” said Philipp Herzig, chief technology officer of SAP, in the announcement. Herzig said bringing the latest scope of Databricks into SAP Business Data Cloud combines SAP’s understanding of business processes and mission-critical applications with Databricks’ data platform, helping customers turn enterprise data into a foundation for what SAP calls the Autonomous Enterprise.
Michael Kiermaier, Databricks’ senior vice president of business strategy and operations, said companies can bring all of their SAP data together on the Databricks platform and combine Genie with Joule to deliver business context to every team and agent.
SAF-Holland Deployment and Availability
SAF-Holland, a global manufacturer of chassis components for trailers, trucks, and buses, uses SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Databricks to unify more than 100 million records of customer, delivery, and material data, and applies machine learning to predict the reliability of customer delivery schedules. According to Databricks, SAF-Holland now generates analyses 5x faster than with traditional reporting approaches and turns complex SAP data into planning and supply chain insights in minutes instead of weeks.
“Opening the SAP data ecosystem to Databricks has unlocked better analysis for our internal teams and ultimately helps us deliver better outcomes for our customers,” said David Gund, senior manager of global digital intelligence at SAF-Holland.
SAP Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Databricks are available now. Databricks directs customers to their SAP or Databricks account teams to learn about the new SAP Application Data Foundation and the expanded SAP Databricks capabilities.
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