The business of Databricks

SAP + Databricks: Unlocking the full power of your enterprise data

By Ryan Neal

Overview

SAP is the gold standard for running transactional business operations. It powers global finance, procurement, supply chain, HR, and manufacturing. But SAP data has long been difficult to integrate with external systems, making it hard to use for advanced analytics, cross-functional reporting. In the world of AI, SAP data is definitely some of companies’ most valuable assets, but it’s also data that is the most difficult to make useful. At Blueprint, we have spent the last decade helping companies extract data from SAP and integrate that data with the rest of their source systems to provide business insights. Manual integration has historically been your only option… Until SAP Databricks.

With SAP Databricks, enterprises can finally unify SAP data with the rest of their ecosystem with very little overhead. This partnership empowers organizations to combine the stability of SAP with the flexibility and intelligence of Databricks. Organizations using SAP can now unlock faster decisions, get real-time insights, and start to democratize data all with a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

The challenge

SAP excels at controlling business processes but was never designed for large-scale analytics or modern data science.
SAP HANA is optimized for transactional performance within SAP, but its proprietary structure and tooling limit accessibility for non-SAP users, making true data democratization across the enterprise difficult.
Data is locked in deeply structured formats and difficult to join with other enterprise systems.
Analytics and AI use cases require extensive custom pipelines, reconciliations, and time-consuming ETL into a Modern Data Estate.

The solution: SAP + Databricks

Customer scenarios

Manually integrating SAP data into a modern data estate significantly increases total cost of ownership by requiring specialized talent, custom pipelines, and ongoing maintenance to keep systems aligned. We do this work for our clients every day. These enterprises invest millions in building fragile integrations just to connect SAP with cloud platforms, vendor systems, or customer data. These efforts slow down insight generation, duplicate work across teams, and divert resources from higher-value initiatives like forecasting and AI.

Here are a few of our customer examples that show why we are so excited about the release of SAP Databricks:

Global infrastructure provider:

A large infrastructure provider set out to build a global inventory control tower to improve visibility across plants, suppliers, and warehouses. Their goal was to gain a real-time understanding of stock levels, material flows, and fulfillment bottlenecks. But the biggest challenge was integrating SAP inventory and materials data with logistics feeds, vendor systems, and demand signals from external platforms. To make the control tower possible, the company had to spend a significant portion of its technology budget building a direct integration with SAP, including hiring specialized SAP engineers and creating custom data pipelines. Even after that investment, reports were delayed, and critical decisions were often based on outdated data.

Global device manufacturer:

A global device manufacturer wanted to get ahead of supply chain disruptions that had plagued their operations in recent years. They needed real-time visibility into material delays, parts shortages, and shipment constraints. SAP contained much of the relevant data, but it lived in siloed modules that were difficult to connect with external logistics platforms and supplier data. The company invested heavily in point-to-point integrations and third-party custom software in an effort to build a comprehensive view of their data. The bespoke solution was difficult to maintain and required a significant amount of annual operating expense to upgrade.

Global Ad delivery company:

A global advertising delivery company aimed to unify its entire go-to-market strategy, bringing together marketing performance, campaign data, sales forecasts, and customer billing. SAP served as the system of record for customer and billing data, but marketing and sales systems lived in cloud-native platforms. Integration efforts required costly API development, repeated data replication, and frequent reconciliation across systems. The customer spent a considerable amount of its budget and time building and managing direct connections with its SAP data in order to enrich its data estate.

The benefits of SAP Databricks

SAP Databricks allows consumers to query shared data using native connectors or standard SQL clients without data replication. It ensures zero-copy data access with fine-grained access control through Unity Catalog, supports sharing across regions and cloud providers, and simplifies SAP data distribution to internal teams, external partners, or downstream platforms. But the biggest result is faster decision-making, reduced data engineering effort, and a future-ready foundation for AI and advanced analytics and a lower TCO across companies’ entire data estate. Here’s an overview of the benefits:

Unified data foundation

Integrate SAP data with CRM, supply chain, finance, marketing, and third-party systems into a single, governed platform eliminating costly data silos and reducing the need for multiple analytics tools. This consolidation improves data consistency, cuts infrastructure costs, and accelerates time-to-insight across business units.

Accelerated time to value

Enable real-time access to SAP data by eliminating manual pipelines, exports, and reconciliation processes. Business users and analysts can act on current data rather than waiting days or weeks for reports, reducing time-to-decision by up to 80% and lowering data engineering costs significantly.

AI-ready architecture

Leverage SAP data alongside external signals such as customer behavior, supplier performance, and market trends to build and operationalize predictive models. This allows enterprises to forecast demand more accurately, optimize inventory levels, reduce churn, and increase revenue by driving smarter decisions at scale.

Cross-functional collaboration

Give finance, operations, supply chain, and commercial teams shared access to SAP data with standardized logic and lineage. This enables consistent KPIs and faster alignment across departments, reducing duplication of effort, improving forecast accuracy, and increasing operational agility.

Enterprise-grade governance and compliance

Use Unity Catalog to centrally manage access, data lineage, and quality across all users and workloads. This ensures regulatory compliance, reduces audit risk, and increases trust in data-driven decisions, while supporting secure data sharing with internal teams and external partners.

Summary

Organizations that rely on SAP struggle to unlock the full value of their data due to rigid structures, integration complexity, and limited analytics scalability. SAP Databricks solves this by providing a unified platform where SAP data can be seamlessly integrated, enriched, and analyzed alongside all other enterprise data. With SAP Databricks, companies gain faster access to trusted SAP data, reduce reliance on fragile pipelines and manual processes, and eliminate the need for costly custom integrations. It enables real-time analytics, scalable machine learning, and cross-functional collaboration all within a secure, governed environment.

Blueprint can share the experience around the work required to integrate SAP data with the rest of your organization. If you’re an SAP customer, you already know the pain, and the solution is here. The result of using SAP Databricks is a significant reduction in time-to-insight, lower total cost of ownership for data infrastructure, improved data-driven decision-making, and a modern architecture that prepares the organization for AI-driven transformation. SAP continues to run the business. Databricks helps you understand, optimize, and grow it.

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