SAP has taken meaningful steps in opening its data to bidrectional sharing across the enterprise, and in decoupling the advanced analytics needed for AI from its ERP upgrade path. During a technical conference last week, the German software giant adopted native support for Apache Iceberg, the open table format, and extended its partnership with Databricks to bring data from legacy ERP systems into its modern cloud analytics platform. "By putting [a] stake in the ground with Iceberg, we now have SAP moving from a very closed application storage model to an open lakehouse model," said Aaron Rosenbaum, Gartner senior director analyst, referring to the concept which brings together data lakes and warehouses. Also important was the bridge between modern analytics in the cloud and on-prem or hosted legacy systems such as ECC, the ERP system broadly adopted by global companies. "SAP made a pretty big move in saying we’re going to open this up, not just to S/4HANA Cloud [the latest ERP system], but ECC users. That coupling — leveraging of AI, leveraging a lakehouse for AI to the ERP upgrade lifecycle — was a problem," said Rosenbaum. In May this year, SAP bought Dremio, a lakehouse platform built around Apache Iceberg, ending its previous preference for Databricks’ Delta Sharing to bring together SAP data products with existing lakehouses bi-directionally. At SAP’s TedEd conference last week, SAP said its Business Data Cloud (BDC) – the "trusted data foundation for SAP Business AI Platform" – would now support native Apache Iceberg and a universal catalog powered by Apache Polaris, "providing an open and governed data foundation for users and [AI agent platform] Joule to consume data." Together with SAP BDC Connect, the new tech policy will support platform interoperability with "zero-copy data sharing" across platforms from Databricks, Snowflake, Google, AWS, and Microsoft. The system would also continue to support Delta Lake, the alternative open table format from Databricks, SAP said . With the integration of Dremio’s SQL query engine, BDC users will also get access to relational databases including SQL Server, MongoDB, Oracle, and PostgreSQL without moving data, the vendor said…
