Dive Brief:
- SAP announced Friday it intends to acquire Reltio, an AI-first master data management provider, to make SAP and non-SAP data work more seamlessly together for AI apps. The company did not return a request for comment about the terms of the deal.
- The acquisition is expected to close in the second or third quarter of this year, and SAP intends to run Reltio’s data cleaning capabilities as a core capability within SAP’s Business Data Cloud with a flexible commercial model where customers can purchase Reltio as a separate tool or with other SAP products. Reltio’s portfolio will also remain available as a standalone offering for the foreseeable future, the company said.
- The acquisition will help both companies “harmonize, cleanse and govern” SAP and non-SAP data for AI use, said Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering, during a Friday media roundtable.
Dive Insight:
SAP has spent the last year trying to break down silos within its enterprise system for AI applications as it works to lead legacy ERP users to its cloud-based offering ahead of a 2027 support deadline.
The provider launched its Business Data Cloud platform, designed in partnership with Databricks, last year, and opened BDC to Google Cloud’s BigQuery data warehouse in the fall to get data flowing more seamlessly.
The company’s cloud revenue forecast missed expectations earlier this year, when share price fell 15% for the steepest on-day decline since 2020. The Reltio acquisition is another step toward building up the cloud platform as it tries to attract legacy database customers.
“AI cannot reach its full potential when data is fragmented across business units, platforms and domains without connection or context,” Alam said in the company’s announcement Friday.
Like SAP, most software vendors are working toward deploying agentic AI, said Christian Hestermann, senior director analyst at Gartner. Reltio’s acquisition will help with the reality that many SAP customers are using a lot of non-SAP tools, and will make data sharing across platforms more reliable, he added.
“It's nice to access data across different silos, but it doesn't help if the quality of the data in those silos, or in those now connected silos, is bad,” Hestermann said. “There is a lot of work to be done on the end-user side.”
As with most ERP platforms, there will be a lag in tool deployment and customer adoption, Hestermann said. The acquisition isn’t expected until later this year, then it will take time to integrate the tools.
“It'll be interesting to watch not only how fast the vendors can release newer technologies, but how much can they help their customers to adopt those technologies,” he said. “And not only technically adopt them, but actually get real business value out of them. That is a much more difficult and a much less solved problem.”
