SAP acquires Reltio to build out SAP Business Data Cloud

SAP said it will acquire Reltio, a master data management firm, in a move that aims to bring more non-SAP data into its platform.

The Reltio deal lands a year after SAP launched its Business Data Cloud with Databricks.

Reltio will boost SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) and make it a fully interoperable data platform for enterprise AI agents. SAP BDC with Reltio will give it more out-of-box data integration for enterprises.

Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product & Engineering, said Reltio will give SAP BDC the ability to unify, cleanse and harmonize data for agentic AI.

Reltio "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," said Alam. Reltio will give SAP customers the ability to leverage data for Joule, Joule Agents and third-party agents.

"Agents need to cut across the enterprise as they define the processes. And they need to not just connect to SAP applications, but anything else that the customers may be running," said Alam.

Reltio's platform manages and governs structured and unstructured data, merges records from different formats and provides a system of context.

Key points:

• Reltio's data cleansing, unification capabilities and agent-driven workflows will work alongside SAP Business Suite applications.
• The goals are to improve decision making, reduce integration complexity and delivered data for AI use cases.
• These workflows from Reltio will work across multiple environments and trigger actions.
• Reltio has prebuilt industry-focused velocity packs that include data models, rules, matching logic and integrations. That vertical focus will complement SAP's offerings.
• Reltio will become a core capability withing SAP BDC.
• SAP added that Reltio will be available standalone for the foreseeable future.

On an analyst call, Alam said:

"(Reltio) allows us to not just have the components in the platform part complete, but also being able to deliver complete, high value, agentic experiences that have the industry capabilities."

Alam added on the call that SAP needed to bring in capabilities for non-SAP data and round out SAP BDC to be an agentic platform. "How many agentic platforms can enterprises maintain? It's never going to be one, but it's probably not going to be also 20," he said.

Ifran Khann, President and Chief Product Officer, SAP Data & Analytics, said:

• "We need to be able to support SAP and non-SAP data and Reltio gives us zero copy sharing on the ingest side and the governance to look at the semantic value of data beyond SAP."
• "We've now become much more opinionated about what we need to have inside our platform as opposed to off the platform."
• "Reltio has an AI-first and cloud-first mentality and has done a lot of work from its inception to have a composable set of core AIs that are callable."