Crashing the SAP-Databricks Party: Snowflake Wants In on the SAP Fun

Just as the red-hot data-cloud party hosted by SAP and Databricks is heating up, Databricks competitor Snowflake is planning to crash the event by forging its own data-centric partnership with SAP.

While some traditionalists might consider such intentions to be tacky or even rude, the truth is that this new trend toward what we can comfortably call partnership promiscuity is becoming an essential strategy in the Cloud Wars here in the early days of the AI Revolution.

Because why? Because businesses in every industry are betting their futures on AI, but they’ll never cash in unless they can fuel their AI ambitions with world-class data.

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With its enterprise applications running core operations for many of the world’s largest corporations, SAP has huge volumes of incredibly valuable data. And by forging a recent partnership with Databricks, SAP is making all that data much easier for customers to access and use via the new SAP Business Data Cloud. For more on that, please see my recent analyses:

In that context, Snowflake’s intentions to get in on the fun with SAP makes perfect sense. And while the partnership has not been disclosed officially, here’s what Snowflake executive vice-president Christian Kleinerman had to say about it on the company’s recent fiscal-Q4 earnings call:

“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,” Kleinerman said.

“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.”

Those comments from Kleinerman came during Snowflake’s very impressive Q4 earnings call as it reported product revenue up 30% and projected strong growth throughout its fiscal year ending January 31, with the pace of growth accelerating in the second half as the company expects to generate $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time.

Final Thought

I think this is a great move by Snowflake, and a great move by SAP. While Databricks might prefer to be SAP’s sole top-level data-engineering partner, Databricks gained enormous visibility and additional credibility by being SAP’s showcase partner for the Business Data Cloud launch, in which SAP CEO Christian Klein played a major part.

Plus, as capable as Databricks is, SAP has massive ambitions in the world of data and AI, so it certainly behooves not only SAP but also its customers for SAP to align itself with a handful of outstanding data-cloud and data-engineering specialists such as Databricks and sometime soon Snowflake and then perhaps — probably — others.