SAP buys Reltio to extract more external data for AI agents

SAP SE buys data integration and management company Reltio Inc. for an undisclosed amount to increase the power of the SAP Business Data Cloud.

The enterprise resource planning software giant launched SAP Business Data Cloud last year in partnership with cloud data lake giant Databricks Inc. The platform is designed to enable companies to build “cognitive applications” that use analytics and artificial intelligence models connected to real-time business data. Those applications will then generate continuous insights and enable intelligent planning across a range of business operations.

SAP said Friday when it announced the deal that Reltio’s technology will be integrated into its Business Data Cloud platform to work with other business data stores and support the development of AI agents by cleaning and synchronizing that data.

According to SAP CEO Muhammad Alam, who is responsible for product engineering at the company, Reltio is a natural fit with SAP Business Data Cloud. “It will continue to enhance our position as a leading enterprise AI provider, integrating SAP and non-SAP data to deliver the data context required by enterprise AI,” Alam said. “AI cannot reach its full potential when data is separated into business units, platforms and domains without connection or context.”

Reltio was founded in 2011 and pioneered a native approach to data integration and master data management. In 2024, it migrated its core database from self-managed Cassandra to Spanner on Google Cloud, a distributed system for Structured Query.

The startup has created an AI-based business solution that can identify and combine related records from different systems and stored in different formats to create a “precious record” of data about customers, suppliers, products, locations and employees. SAP said it will use this technology to integrate data across SAP and non-SAP applications, creating its own gold standard to be used as the basis for AI agents.

Reltio’s other capabilities include data integration, data cleansing, data quality management and compliance, which will also be useful for AI agents. These capabilities will allow SAP Business Data Cloud applications to improve their decision-making, reduce integration complexity and deliver reliable, consistent data to inform AI and other business processes, SAP said.

DbInsight analyst Tony Baer said in a LinkedIn post that Reltio dramatically expands the data integration capabilities of SAP Business Data Cloud. “It was a big change for SAP when it announced the BDC a few years ago, acknowledging that while SAP is the center of business intelligence, there are other points of focus,” he wrote. “SAP and BDC’s goal was initially to clean house with a common ‘One Domain Model’ for all SAP data. And from that One Domain model, expose it as business products that can be shared with partners like Databricks, Google BigQuery, Snowflake Data Cloud, and Microsoft Fabric.”

While SAP Business Data Cloud focuses on integrating SAP data externally, Reltio provides the tools needed to integrate non-SAP data and share it with SAP, Baer said.

SAP will combine Reltio’s capabilities with SAP Business Data Cloud, but also plans to continue offering its technology as a separate product “for the foreseeable future,” the company said.

Image: SAP