SAP looking to pull more external data into its AI platform with Reltio acquisition
SAP is to acquire master data management and data integration specialist Reltio with the promise of helping integrate data from outside the vendor's broad application portfolio into its AI platform.
The move may be aimed at boosting adoption of SAP's Business Data Cloud (BDC), a service launched in February 2025 in an alliance with data lake and AI platform vendor Databricks. It was set up to build "insight apps" that use analytics tools and AI models connected to real-time data from applications to provide insights and planning capabilities across a range of business activities.
SAP argues the move will help make BDC "fully interoperable" with other stores of enterprise data to support the development of AI agents by cleansing and harmonizing data.
Muhammad Alam, SAP board exec for product and engineering, said: "Acquiring [Reltio] will further improve our position as a leading business AI provider, combining SAP and non-SAP data to deliver data context that business AI requires. AI cannot reach its full potential when data is fragmented across business units, platforms and domains without connection or context."
Founded in 2011, Reltio aimed to create a "cloud-native" approach to data integration and MDM. In 2024, it migrated its underlying database from a self-managed instance of wide-column database Cassandra to Spanner on Google Cloud, the distributed SQL system. Reltio customers include pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer, hotel group Radisson, and entertainment company Warner Bros.
Reltio uses what it calls an AI-based entity resolution system to find and merge related records from different formats and applications into what it dubs a "golden record" of data about customers, products, suppliers, locations, and employees, for example. SAP expects to use this system to integrate data across SAP and non-SAP applications – the vendor has ERP, HR, CRM, supply chain, and procurement systems – and use that to develop AI agents. SAP has so far struggled to grab users' attention with BDC. In December, research from DSAG, the German-speaking user group, found that 83 percent of its members were only slightly familiar with BDC or not familiar with it at all.
Tony Baer, principal analyst at dbInsight, said the Reltio acquisition takes data integration further than BDC does on its own.
"It was a major strategy shift for SAP when it announced BDC a few years back, acknowledging that while SAP is a focal point for enterprise business data, there are other focal points as well," Baer said in an online post. "SAP's mission with BDC was first about cleaning its own house with a common 'One Domain Model' for all SAP data. And from that One Domain Model, expose as business products that can be shared with partners like Databricks, Google BigQuery, Snowflake Data Cloud, and Microsoft Fabric."
While BDC was mainly about sharing SAP data externally, the Reltio move is about harmonizing data from non-SAP systems and sharing it with SAP, he said.
Binoy James, SVP applications at SAP consultancy Protera, noted DSAG had found that BDC customers stuck mid-migration end up paying full cloud fees for a system they cannot use. "That line is going to haunt SAP's sales deck for a while," he said. ®
