According to Forbes, Snowflake just announced a partnership with SAP that could boost its revenue growth rate by about five percentage points. SAP brings 440,000 customers to the table—roughly 40 times Snowflake’s current customer base—with 34,000 companies specifically using SAP’s Business Data Cloud. Snowflake’s Executive Vice President Christian Kleinerman called this a “meaningful business opportunity” in a November 3 interview. The partnership makes Snowflake’s AI platform available as an SAP solution extension, streamlining access to enterprise data that currently requires expensive third-party integration. If just 5% of those Business Data Cloud customers sign up, it could add $1.1 billion to Snowflake’s estimated 2026 revenue of $5.5 billion. Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca is already praising the collaboration for accelerating their data and AI capabilities.
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This Changes Everything for Enterprise Data
Here’s the thing: this partnership addresses what’s been a massive pain point for enterprises. Companies have been stuck using third-party services to pull data from SAP systems, which Kleinerman described as a “time consuming and expensive process” requiring scheduled data pulls and manual harmonization. Now? Snowflake customers get direct access to SAP’s treasure trove of ERP, HR, and procurement data through the Business Data Cloud. That’s huge for AI applications that need real-time, contextual business data.
Who Wins and Who Loses Here
Snowflake clearly gets the biggest immediate win—access to 34,000 potential new customers without the customer acquisition costs. But SAP benefits too by offering more choice to its massive customer base. They already partner with Databricks and Google’s BigQuery, so this isn’t exclusive. The losers? Probably those third-party integration companies that were making money helping businesses connect to SAP data. And honestly, this puts pressure on Snowflake’s competitors who now have to match this level of seamless enterprise integration.
The Math Behind That 5% Growth Boost
So how does this actually translate to dollars? The math works out pretty compellingly. If 5% of SAP’s Business Data Cloud customers (that’s 1,700 companies) sign up and pay Snowflake’s average revenue per customer of $325,000, you’re looking at over half a billion dollars. But here’s where it gets interesting: Snowflake’s usage-based pricing means customers who start using more SAP data through this integration will naturally spend more over time. Kleinerman noted that “the more data customers access, the more computing resource they use, and the more revenue we receive.” That’s the real long-term play here.
What This Means for Enterprise AI
Basically, this partnership makes enterprise AI actually useful for business operations. Think about sales teams getting real-time customer data before calls, or supply chain managers accessing live procurement information. The friction that’s been holding back practical AI applications just got significantly reduced. And with Snowflake coming off 32% revenue growth in their last quarter, this could be exactly what they need to reaccelerate that momentum. The question now is how quickly those “hundreds or thousands of mutual customers” Kleinerman mentioned actually start adopting this. If the uptake is strong, we could be looking at a very different competitive landscape in enterprise data by next year.
