I'm new to Databrick but have been working in the SAP Analytics space since 1998. Overall, the data lake concept was missed / ignored by SAP until their release of Data Warehouse Cloud which became Datasphere and now SAP Business Data Cloud. Even then it felt like an afterthought, which to me indicated they were not overly concerned about the Data Science and ML use cases. The explosion of AI into the public (and enterprise) consciousness brought these use case and the need for a proper platform front and center. Being quite behind, this partnership makes a lot of sense from the SAP perspective as a way to plug a large gap in the architecture. From a Databricks perspective I believe it instantly puts them on the roadmap of all SAP customers.
I expect we'll see a number of adoption patterns emerge with some customers favoring a Databricks centric platform. The interesting pieces to work out for me are the areas where there is overlap and integration, such that the solutions are seamless to the users and to the administrators / operations team (metadata and security are top of mind).
I see this as a good opportunity for both companies and their customers, but some bumps along the way are certainly to be expected.
-J. Graham
