SAP Databricks

Introduction 

Have you heard about the bold Databricks-SAP partnership? The new SAP Databricks integration is poised to revolutionize how enterprises unlock value from their core systems for AI and analytics. 

The Data Lakehouse revolution is transforming the way enterprises manage and utilize data. Despite modern tooling, cloud-native platforms, and AI breakthroughs, SAP data remains one of the enterprise's most complex and under-leveraged assets.  

SAP powers the core of most large organizations—finance, supply chain, manufacturing HR - but the data it generates is often locked in silos, buried in complexity, and stripped of business meaning once it leaves the system. If you've tried to derive insights from SAP, you’ve likely encountered the same integration issues. For data leaders trying to drive AI, analytics, and digital transformation, SAP data has become both a goldmine and a bottleneck. 

That’s no longer sustainable in a world where speed, trust, and intelligence are everything. 

Business Challenges

Despite massive investments in data platforms, enterprises continue to face significant challenges in unlocking value from their SAP data. The problem isn't just access - it's trust, usability, and agility. 

Here are the top challenges that we hear from data leaders: 

• Poor Data Quality and Trust: 55% of organizations cite this as their number one barrier. 

• Siloed & Fragmented Data: SAP data is often disconnected from the rest of the enterprise. 

• Complex Integrations: Building and maintaining pipelines drains time, resources, and budget. 

• Loss of Business Context: Data often loses meaning during extraction. 

• Limited AI Potential: Many AI initiatives overlook SAP data due to access issues and a lack of scalable infrastructure to build AI models. 

• High Data Management Costs: Hidden expenses of data duplication and maintenance. 

• Legacy SAP Modernization: On-prem BW and ECC are hard to scale and modernize. 

Enter SAP Databricks… 

In a move that could reshape how enterprises unlock SAP data, Databricks and SAP have partnered to address one of the most persistent challenges in the data world: leveraging the full potential of SAP data for AI, analytics, and business innovation. 

What is SAP Databricks? 

SAP Databricks is a strategic integration between SAP and Databricks, designed to make SAP data accessible, usable, and valuable in the open Lakehouse architecture. 

It enables organizations to generate valuable insights from their SAP data through AI, machine learning, and data engineering capabilities while maintaining data governance and security with the Unity Catalog. 

It’s not just another connector—this is a deep integration that respects SAP’s complex metadata, logic, and business context while using the power of Databricks' scalable Lakehouse platform. 

At a high level, SAP Databricks: 

Allows direct and governed access to SAP data from within Databricks with Unity Catalog 

• Preserves business semantics, including SAP CDS views and hierarchies 

• Simplifies real-time and batch pipelines with zero-copy data integration using Delta Sharing 

• Enables AI/ML directly on SAP data using notebooks, MLflow, and Unity Catalog 

• Allows the use of out-of-the-box SAP data products with the rest of the enterprise data  

How SAP Databricks Solves the Problem 

Imagine predicting supply chain disruptions in real-time by combining SAP transactional data with external data in Databricks. With SAP Databricks, organizations can finally break down the SAP data barrier and fully operationalize it across their business workflows. Here’s what makes it a game-changer: 

• Accelerated AI/ML: Faster time-to-market for AI applications and more accurate business predictions with access to SAP data to build predictive models, LLM-powered copilots, and intelligent apps 

• Real-Time Insights: Use streaming capabilities to make SAP data available with minimal latency—for dashboards, anomaly detection, or operational triggers 

• Unified Architecture: Eliminate data silos by combining SAP data with non-SAP sources like Salesforce, Databricks, and IoT in a single Lakehouse platform 

• Preserved Business Context: Instead of reverse-engineering SAP logic, SAP Databricks understands and respects existing business semantics 

• Enterprise-Grade Governance: With Unity Catalog, you can govern SAP data access down to the column level across regions and business units 

How XponentL Helps Our Customers 

At XponentL, we help enterprises build AI-ready data products and implement GenAI solutions to solve business problems across various industries. We work closely with the business and technology teams, preparing them to harness the power of SAP Databricks to unify SAP and non-SAP data and generate trusted, governed, and scalable insights. Whether you’re looking to accelerate your AI solution delivery, simplify SAP integration, or empower business teams with real-time, actionable insights, we bring Databricks architecture and engineering muscle with deep SAP expertise to make it happen. Let's connect if you're ready to extract real value from your SAP data – whether you're just exploring or prepared to go deep. 

Let us know the most significant challenges you've faced with SAP data integration. How do you envision SAP Databricks addressing these challenges?