Racing to become an AI-first provider of agentic applications powered by its increasingly capable Business Data Cloud, SAP is acquiring Reltio to expand customers’ access to clean and harmonized AI-ready data from not only SAP systems but also non-SAP systems.
SAP’s ambitious AI aspirations are predicated on a few key points:
- Its long-time status as the world’s leading supplier of enterprise applications
- Its aggressive commitment to rewriting its vast portfolio as agentic applications
- Its ability to help customers access *all* of their data for AI
- Its ability to convince customers that the combination of those nascent agentic apps plus SAP’s year-old Business Data Cloud is the best choice for business success in the AI Economy
SAP has always had the applications, and it has always had the extremely valuable data from those apps. The new effort is to leverage those traditional assets into modern Agentic AI solutions that can help customers not only boost efficiency for existing processes but also create new ones that drive enhanced business outcomes. And at the center of that effort lies the SAP Business Data Cloud, whose debut I analyzed a year ago in a piece headlined SAP Launching Massive Move Beyond Apps into Data and Agents.
The planned acquisition of 15-year-old Reltio can have a significant impact on the third and fourth of those points outlined just above. In the SAP press release outlining the planned takeover, SAP head of product-engineering Muhammad Alam said 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.”
And that’s the key point: Without a superb data foundation, AI visions and dreams will eventually turn into business nightmares. SAP believes that Reltio can quickly help the SAP Business Data Cloud rise above the slew of competitors claiming to have comparable or better offerings. From the press release:
Reltio’s platform helps organizations manage and govern structured and unstructured enterprise data from start to finish…. Its cloud-native, AI-first design supports a single, consistent view of customers, products, suppliers, locations and employees across both SAP and non-SAP applications. Customers running AI tasks will benefit from increased reliability and consistency of data, bundled in a single source of truth, improving business AI.
A Reltio blog post about the proposed acquisition emphasized the high-level objective of strengthening SAP’s hand in Agentic AI by bringing new capabilities to its Business Data Cloud:
SAP’s vision is to strengthen Business Data Cloud and accelerate its evolution into a fully interoperable enterprise data platform for enterprise-wide agentic AI. Bringing Reltio into that vision is intended to help customers unify, cleanse, and harmonize data across sources so analytics and AI agents can work from trusted, high-quality information.
Reltio was built for complex, multi-vendor environments. Our cloud-native, AI-first platform is designed to work across heterogeneous IT landscapes, helping customers connect and govern data that lives across many different systems…. For customers, that means fewer silos, cleaner data, stronger consistency, and better outcomes from automation and AI.
Final Thought
In January, I moved SAP up to the #4 spot on my Cloud Wars Top 10 weekly rankings (it had been #5) because of my belief in the willingness and ability of product chief Alam and CEO Christian Klein to continue the aggressive transformation of the company’s mindset, product portfolio, and go-to-market strategies.
The Reltio acquisition — coupled with SAP’s relentless efforts to continue shaping its Business Data Cloud into a world-class asset for customers — is a significant step in the company’s rapid evolution to an AI-first agentic-apps powerhouse.
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