Although SAP’s launch of its Business Data Cloud early this year could have pitted it directly against Snowflake and its AI Data Cloud, the two data-centric powerhouses are instead collaborating deeply to jointly drive better business outcomes for customers.
While promiscuity is generally not perceived as a virtue in our modern culture, here in the Cloud Wars it’s becoming an indispensable attribute helping customers overcome the considerable technological and temporal obstacles they face in transforming their businesses for the AI Economy.
In yet another example of how the power and potential of the AI Revolution are forging promiscuous partnerships that a couple of years ago might have seemed impossible, SAP and Snowflake are pushing their alliance to unprecedented new levels by:
- creating bidirectional services that capitalize on each other’s strengths and filling in gaps in the other’s capabilities;
- intertwining their corporate brands via a new solution called SAP Snowflake to make it unmistakably clear to customers that this is a serious and long-haul partnership;
- simplifying the means by which SAP Business Data Cloud customers can tap into the power of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, rather than forcing customers to have to design, implement, and pay for complex workarounds; and
- helping customers focus on growth-oriented innovation rather than yet another long cycle of low-value data integration.
The requirements of full participation in the nascent AI Economy are starkly different from the business-technology needs of just a couple of years ago, and I think it is fabulous to see companies like SAP and Snowflake figure out ways to work together to help joint customers do things that neither vendor could enable on its own.
AI Agent & Copilot Summit is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents. Building on its 2025 success, the 2026 event takes place March 17-19 in San Diego. Get more details.
From the SAP announcement, here’s how Irfan Khan, President and Chief Product Officer for SAP Data and Analytics outlined the new collaboration:
“Bringing Snowflake to SAP Business Data Cloud empowers our customers with openness and choice. Together, we combine SAP’s decades of leadership in mission-critical business applications with Snowflake’s modern data platform to deliver a unified, enterprise-ready, and SAP-supported experience that extends the value of business data across the entire ecosystem.”
And, from the Snowflake perspective, Executive Vice-President of Products Christian Kleinerman put the focus on making customers’ lives simpler while simultaneously accelerating their innovation:
“By tightly integrating SAP and Snowflake, we’re making it simple for enterprises to connect their critical business data with its rich context in SAP with the power of seamless AI app and data agent development at scale in Snowflake. Enterprises can now innovate faster with Snowflake and SAP BDC and seamlessly share data between the platforms — zero-copy and fully governed.”
This is an outcome Snowflake has been pursuing with SAP for quite some time. As I wrote back in March in an analysis headlined “Crashing the SAP-Databricks Party: Snowflake Wants in on the SAP Fun,” Kleinerman spoke of Snowflake’s desire to create a data-centric partnership with SAP during a Snowflake earnings call almost eight months ago.
On that earnings call, Kleinerman said, “We’ve always done bidirectional types of sharing and data movement with a number of partners. While we don’t have a specific announcement to share re SAP today, I can tell you that we are working with SAP…. We like what they’re doing with their new Business Data Cloud product, and we have a common commitment to foster an open data environment, and hope to share more with all of you soon.”
Final Thought
To help their customers thrive in the AI Revolution, the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies are beginning to make some huge advances in not just the technology they create but also the partnerships that make that technology even more valuable for customers.
In my mind, the ultimate expression of this is the Oracle multicloud deals with Oracle’s major cloud-infrastructure competitors wherein Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS all now offer the Oracle Database through their clouds to their customers. Two years ago, most of us would have dismissed such an idea as absolutely crazy.
Yet, here we are — and the shared customers of Oracle and each of its three competitors are reaping the benefits, which thereby also accrue to all of the hyperscalers.
Indeed, the upheaval in the AI Revolution is about mindset as much as it’s about technology — and I give a lot of credit to SAP and Snowflake for creating new ways for customers to realize enhanced business outcomes that neither SAP nor Snowflake could have generated individually.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
