SAP and Collibra expand their partnership, integrating Collibra's data governance tools into SAP Datasphere, bolstering data management and governance for AI and analytics.
SAP and data management vendor Collibra are putting some teeth into a partnership that was first unveiled more than a year ago.
The two vendors are launching new integrations between Collibra's data governance, data catalog and metadata management capabilities and SAP Datasphere, a data service that integrates data from sources across the organization.
Collibra has partnered with SAP since Datasphere debuted in March 2023. Now, Collibra's data intelligence tools are integrated into the SAP Analytics Cloud business intelligence (BI) system, according to the companies. This new integration is generally available. Additional Collibra integrations to support SAP Datasphere models will be generally available later this year.
The expanded partnership and direct integrations signify an advance in data management capabilities for customers, which is particularly important as trusted and well-governed data becomes increasingly necessary for AI and advanced analytics, according to analysts.
Addressing data challenges
Collibra and SAP decided to broaden their relationship based on projects and discussions with common customers, according to Mike Robertson, vice president of technology partnerships at Collibra.
"We had a number of conversations with our joint customers to understand how we could partner to help them with their data challenges," Robertson said. "The partnership has been built from this foundation, the importance of data and helping our customers do more with the data they have."
Collibra is working with other enterprise technology vendors to help companies deal with data management challenges, he said.
"Our customers have complex data landscapes, and we are working to find ways to make it easier for them to address challenges around governance, quality and management of their data assets," Robertson said. "We have strong relationships with cloud providers, BI and visualization partners, data lakes and data warehouse, master data management and AI data platform partners."
Focus on data trust and governance
The focused integration of Collibra and SAP Datasphere provides data management benefits to customers, according to Jayesh Chaurasia, an analyst at Forrester Research.
For one, it will bolster SAP's focus on data governance and help to ensure that all data -- including data that's used for AI -- is trustworthy and well governed, Chaurasia said.
Collibra's data governance capabilities enable SAP to offer customers a more comprehensive platform that provides accurate, governed data from various sources and lays a strong foundation for effective AI deployment, he said.
"It supports a unified and consolidated view of data assets across SAP and non-SAP environments," Chaurasia said.
SAP has always been a tough platform to extract the metadata from, so this integration makes that simpler and provides an edge to Collibra.
Jayesh ChaurasiaAnalyst, Forrester Research
This, in turn, will provide business users easy access to trusted and governed data, which could lead to better decision-making.
"It ensures that AI models are fed with high-quality data and enables business users to leverage AI insights effectively without deep technical expertise," Chaurasia said.
Direct integrations always help in connecting to systems and gathering the metadata, he added.
"SAP has always been a tough platform to extract the metadata from, so this integration makes that simpler and provides an edge to Collibra," Chaurasia said.
The expanded integration shows signs of progress that the two vendors are beginning to deliver on the promise when the partnership began in 2023, specifically for the highly regulated customers they share, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
It will help joint customers to not only securely access and harness data from across distributed data sources using SAP Datasphere, but also to classify, improve discoverability, track lineage, and ensure policy-based enforcement of rules and regulations using Collibra, he said.
"It's a synergistic partnership that makes sense, particularly as organizations seek to securely and appropriately use data to power new AI initiatives," Henschen said.
Eric Avidon, a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial, contributed to this report.
Jim O'Donnell is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial who covers ERP and other enterprise applications.
