SAP SE is buying the data integration and management firm Reltio Inc. for an undisclosed fee in order to boost the capabilities of SAP Business Data Cloud.

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

SAP said Friday when it announced the deal that Reltio’s technology will be integrated with the Business Data Cloud platform to make it interoperable with other enterprise data stores and support the development of sophisticated AI agents by cleaning and harmonizing that data.

According to SAP board executive Muhammad Alam, who oversees product engineering at the company, Reltio is a natural fit with the SAP Business Data Cloud. “It 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,” Alam said. “AI cannot reach its full potential when data is fragmented across business units, platforms and domains without connection or context.”

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

The startup has created an AI-based entity resolution system that’s able to identify and merge related records from different applications and stored in different formats to create a “golden record” of data about customers, suppliers, products, locations and employees. SAP said it will use this technology to integrate data across both SAP and non-SAP applications, creating its own golden record to use as the foundation of AI agents.

Reltio’s other capabilities span data integration, data cleansing, data quality management and compliance, which will also come in handy for AI agents. These capabilities will enable SAP Business Data Cloud applications to improve their decision making, reduce integration complexity and deliver trusted, consistent data to inform AI and other business processes, SAP said.

DbInsight analyst Tony Baer said in a LinkedIn post that Reltio dramatically expands SAP Business Data Cloud’s data integration capabilities. “It was a major strategy shift for SAP when it announced BDC a few years back, acknowledging that while SAP is a focal point for enterprise business data, there are other focal points as well,” he wrote. “SAP’s mission with BDC was first about cleaning its own house with a common ‘One Domain Model’ for all SAP data. And from that One Domain Model, expose as business products that can be shared with partners like Databricks, Google BigQuery, Snowflake Data Cloud, and Microsoft Fabric.”

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

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

Photo: SAP