SAP to acquire Reltio to help customers make data AI-ready

ERP giant SAP has agreed to acquire master data management software provider Reltio to bolster the capabilities of its Business Data Cloud (BDC).

The goal is to make customers’ data AI-ready so it provides reliable input for Joule and Joule agents across the enterprise, SAP said.

Acquiring Reltio, with its cloud native and AI native master data management solution, will enable SAP to expand its scope to harmonize, cleanse, and govern data in SAP and non-SAP systems, said SAP Executive Board member for Product & Engineering Muhammad Alam

“It allows us to deliver on both the promise of AI that cut across the full enterprise, but also allows us to complete the enterprise data platform story and the journey that we started with Business Data Cloud last year,” he said.

Since BDC’s launch, SAP customers had been asking for a more complete master data management solution, and that’s where Reltio comes in, he said: “This allows us to add capabilities that allows us to govern and manage the master data across the fullness of an enterprise.”

Irfan Khan, president and chief product officer for SAP Data and Analytics, said, “being able to look at the semantical value of data beyond SAP was clearly a key requirement that we had to address.”

Reltio’s core value is its AI-first and cloud-first mentality, he said, and looked forward to when all of SAP’s usiness suite applications can take advantage of all the MDM capabilities it offers.

Reltio CEO Manish Sood expressed his excitement in a post on LinkedIn. “SAP sits at the center of how the global economy runs. Reltio enables the unification and activation of data across SAP and non-SAP systems, creating a complete, real-time view of customers, suppliers, products, partners, and more,” he wrote. “Together, that opens the door to something bigger: a true context layer for the enterprise, where trusted data flows across every application, every workflow, and every AI-driven decision.”

Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, noted that this acquisition continues SAP’s journey within BDC to elevate its data layer to a unified cross-application one.

“This is key to SAP’s AI-first strategy as ERP seeks to move from a ‘system of record’ to a ‘system of context’ that feeds Joule and overall agentic workflows,” he said.

“This matters for CIOs as SAP has been a traditionally closed ecosystem where integrations are both necessary and painful to create and maintain,” he added. “SAP BDC and acquisitions like Reltio seek to open the system to be interoperable and the core of a multi-system data foundation, a prerequisite for composable architecture systems.… Reltio provides MDM capabilities that provide a neutral, cross-platform data layer.”

However, he noted, “similar in approach to Salesforce’s acquisition of Informatica to underpin their Data Cloud product. SAP continues to eschew best in class capability providers, however, settling for second best. We saw this with the Signavio acquisition after talks with Celonis fell apart. Good enough may be acceptable to SAP, but will it work for their customers?”

SAP did not announce the terms of the deal, which remains subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.”