SAP’s Dizzying Data Shuffle: Is Dremio the Final Piece?
The reality is plain: the BDC is a half-baked edifice. By acquiring Dremio rather than merely partnering with it, SAP is attempting to absorb the competition it could not outpace. While they strike uneasy alliances with Snowflake and Databricks, the struggle for total dominion continues.
In 2021, a representative from Dremio, Narwhal spoke to me of “Lightning Fast Queries” with promising world where a “Data Lake Engine” could accelerate business by a thousand fold, slashing the costs of the hyper scaler services. Even then, the Narwhal had convinced giants: General Motors, PayPal, Mars. As a consultant tethered to the SAP ecosystem, I sensed a shift in the wind, though the nomenclature was purposefully cloudy. I was told of Data Lakes that were not Warehouses, and of “zero duplication,” while the data sat quietly in S3 or ADLS or under the shadow of the yellow elephant, Hadoop.
Now, the official bulletins have been released: SAP intends to acquire Dremio. The Narwhal is being brought into the fold.
For a decade, we’ve watched SAP’s restless shuffle through the data landscape, a dizzying succession of BW, HANA, BusinessObjects, and Lumira, leading up to today’s Analytics Cloud and Datasphere. Each was sold as a new promise, yet we remained trapped in a maze of restrictive data access and API policies and shifting cloud strategies. We used to say data was gold; now, with the rise of hungry AI agents, we’re told raw files like CSV and Parquet files are “food.”
Look closely at the architecture of the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC). It is an umbrella, wide and heavy. Underneath, we find Analytics Cloud, Datasphere and the newly “SAP prefixed” Databricks . BDC relies on Object Store services — HANA Cloud Data Lake Files — because it is far cheaper to keep data in file-based storage than to feed the expensive in-memory appetite of HANA.
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We are invited to celebrate “Zero-Copy Sharing,” a phrase that rings with a certain newspeak charm. Yet Databricks already patrols this territory with Apache Spark and Delta Sharing. Now comes Dremio, bringing Apache Iceberg and the Apache Arrow engine. It sounds suspiciously like HANA, yet it exists outside it.
The reality is plain: the BDC is a half-baked edifice. By acquiring Dremio rather than merely partnering with it, SAP is attempting to absorb the competition it could not outpace. While they strike uneasy alliances with Snowflake and Databricks, the struggle for total dominion continues.
SAP has long sought to be recognized as a true cloud power, but they have been losing ground. They are building the BDC as a gateway that is a controlled checkpoint between a customers’ records and the AI agents of the future. The question remains: in this centralized architecture, what is the actual business model for the customer? SAP is building a gateway, but we must ask: at what cost, and who truly controls the access?
References:
SAP News (2026, May 4). SAP to Acquire Dremio to Unify SAP and Non-SAP Data to Power Agentic AI SAP News
Sendur Sellakumar/Dremio, Tomer Shiran/Dremio (2026, May 4). SAP Intends to Acquire Dremio Dremio Blog
Tuncay Karaca/Novel Way (2026, May 9). SAP’s Dizzying Data Shuffle: Is Dremio the Final Piece? Inside the Enterprise
