At a press conference, Philipp Herzig, Chief Technology Officer at SAP, emphasized, among other things, the ability of Dremio technology to work with company data while it is still in the company’s on-prem systems – a feature that is particularly essential for highly regulated companies.
Flavio Villanustre, CISO of the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, also sees this as a major advantage. Although Databricks and Snowflake offer powerful functions, users would first have to transfer their data to the respective platform and reformat it in order to then be able to access a central data lake: “Dremio, on the other hand, offers simple, decentralized data access through which users can access their data directly on-premises.”
According to the security decision-maker, this could have a negative impact on data processing performance, but is offset by the user-friendliness and flexibility gained. An implementation that takes place in days instead of weeks or months is another plus point.
Sanchit Vir Gogia, principal analyst at Greyhound Research, takes a more nuanced view: “Snowflake and Databricks have both invested heavily in external data access, sharing, open formats, governance levels and interoperability. It would be unfair to describe them as old-style platforms where ‘everything has to move first’. But the overarching argument is valid: Dremio assumes that enterprise data is already distributed and the real problems are access, context, Federation and governance exist – not complete relocation.”
This is important for SAP customers because of the nature of many of their data sets, Gogia continued: “Most large SAP landscapes are not clean, centralized data environments. They are brownfield landscapes with SAP and non-SAP data, legacy warehouses, departmental data lakes, regional repositories, acquired systems, partner data and industry-specific platforms.”
Telling these customers that AI readiness starts with moving everything to a central platform is a good thing from a provider perspective, but it means a huge amount of effort for buyers, says the analyst. Dremio, on the other hand, offers SAP the opportunity for a more pragmatic concept: “So SAP can say: Leave the majority of your data where it is, access it faster, apply more consistent semantic controls and integrate it into the Business Data Cloud and AI workflows – all without having to undertake an extensive migration program in advance.”
