SAP and Snowflake add zero-copy sharing between their systems

SAP and Snowflake are collaborating to extend SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) with Snowflake’s data and AI platform, they announced Tuesday at SAP TechEd in Berlin.

The companies are also enabling zero copy bidirectional sharing of data between SAP and existing Snowflake instances via SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake.

This is the third such partnership announced in recent months, following integrations with Databricks in February and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) BigQuery last month.

“With Snowflake, what we effectively have is a primary sharing mechanism of data products,” said Irfan Khan, SAP’s data and analytics president and chief operating officer. “It’s a high fidelity data exchange where you preserve the semantics of the data, and not just raw data that gets pumped around from site to site. It really gives you the context of your business user who may want to access the data from SAP and non-SAP data in that Snowflake environment.”

To get to this point, he said, the company has had to translate all of its core primary data sitting inside its line-of-business applications, representing all the key processes and the underlying data associated with them as primary data products.

Christian Kleinerman, EVP of product at Snowflake, added, “The opportunity now is to unlock the data’s full potential by combining it with all your other enterprise data. That’s why our new strategic partnership with SAP is a true game changer. This partnership will bring you the full power of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud as an SAP solution, an extension for SAP Business Data Cloud.”

However, Khan said, SAP Snowflake differs from SAP Databricks in that it’s an add-on to BDC, whereas SAP Databricks is a first-party service, an integral part of BDC that can be paid for with BDC Capacity Units, one of several virtual currencies SAP uses for managing customers’ committed spend. He did not provide pricing for either SAP Snowflake, scheduled to be available in the first quarter of 2026, or SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, planned for general availability in the first half of 2026.

Preserving meaning

Analysts agree that the partnership reflects a genuine need.

“In the past, organizations were forced to stitch SAP data into Snowflake through custom integration, leading to duplicated data sets and potential gaps in data governance,” said Robert Kramer, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “The joint solution preserves the contextual meaning of business data and maintains SAP’s governance controls, accelerating advanced projects and allowing teams to drive outcomes faster. Snowflake-focused enterprises can now bring in SAP data cleanly, without undermining SAP’s security and compliance model,” he said.

Plus, he noted, “The collaboration shifts their relationship from informal integration to formal alignment, a step for large enterprises that require official support structures and alignment to product roadmaps. Snowflake earns new legitimacy in the SAP ecosystem, while SAP customers benefit from broader flexibility and access to modern data and AI tooling inside SAP’s trusted guardrails.”

Scott Bickley, an advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, added, “Snowflake was the missing link, the vendor that SAP needed to ink a deal with to round out their BDC platform in terms of enabling bi-directional, zero-copy data sharing with non-SAP data sources.”

And, noted Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO of Greyhound Research, this partnership feels “less like a technical upgrade and more like SAP finally recognising how its customers actually work.”

How customers actually work

Previously, doing serious analytics or AI with SAP data meant that customers had to extract it, replicate it, and then rebuild trust in it somewhere else, a painful, slow, and expensive process, he said. “But now, with this new solution extension, Snowflake can access SAP’s Business Data Cloud directly. No copying. No extra pipelines. Governance stays where it should, with the original data. For many teams, especially those juggling multiple platforms, this is the practical breakthrough they have been waiting for.”

However, he added, “Users will need to be watchful about governance consistency and billing complexity-two things that can easily derail the benefits if not addressed head-on. Those risks don’t undermine the value, but they do underline the need for joint guidance, clear policies, and architectural discipline.”

Bickley agreed. “SAP clients have the choice of consuming this capacity via the SAP Snowflake service from within BDC, or they can avail themselves of the service via the SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Snowflake capability to merge pre-existing data models with BDC,” he said. “Prospective customers of these features should carefully examine the costs associated with either option, as BDC is a consumption-based model measured in Capacity Units (CU). As many SAP customers no doubt already have existing contracts with Snowflake directly, the new BDC integrations likely add to the total cost of ownership when utilizing Snowflake within BDC, or even for leveraging the Connect functionality. Customers should explore options with SAP and Snowflake as to how these existing Snowflake entitlements can be leveraged on BDC as seamlessly as their data flows.”