Snowflake and SAP partnered to eliminate friction and streamline access to SAP's rich business data (ERP, HR, procurement) for AI/ML applications.This collaboration makes Snowflake's AI platform an SAP solution extension, offering SAP's 34,000+ Business Data Cloud customers unified, enterprise-ready data access.The partnership could significantly boost Snowflake's revenue growth rate by an estimated five percentage points, addressing a major unmet customer need for integrated data.

SAP has 440,000 customers, according to the company, about 40 times more than Snowflake.

Today, Snowflake announced a partnership that could help the company access some of those SAP customers.

This partnership between Snowflake – an AI data platform provider -- and SAP – a supplier of enterprise applications and business AI – will make Snowflake’s AI platform available as an SAP solution extension for companies using SAP’s Business Data Cloud – a way to access all the data embedded in SAP’s applications, according to a Snowflake release.

But a top executive shared enthusiasm for the deal. “I am incredibly excited about this meaningful business opportunity for us,” Snowflake’s Executive Vice President of Product Christian Kleinerman told me in a November 3 interview.

How much will this partnership accelerate Snowflake’s revenue growth? Kleinerman did not say. My estimate is the partnership could boost Snowflake’s revenue growth rate by about five percentage points – depending on what percent of SAP customers purchase Snowflake’s AI Data cloud services.

SAP sees this partnership helping its customers gain access to data to help them run their business more effectively. “Bringing Snowflake to SAP Business Data Cloud empowers our customers with openness and choice,” President and Chief Product Officer for SAP Data and Analytics Irfan Khan said in the release.

“Together, we combine SAP’s decades of leadership in mission-critical business applications with Snowflake’s modern data platform to deliver a unified, enterprise-ready, and SAP-supported experience that extends the value of business data across the entire ecosystem,” Khan added.

The partnership with Snowflake will help SAP by broadening the choices for SAP customers. SAP already has partnerships with cloud storage platform Data Bricks and BigQuery – Google’s cloud data warehouse.

There are three ways this partnership can benefit SAP. “A customer which already has data with Snowflake can use BDC to connect with SAP data from our ERP, HR (from our SuccessFactors acquisition), and procurement (from Ariba) applications," Kahn told me in a November 3 interview. “The second customer use would be an SAP customer that wants access to Snowflake. And the third is a hybrid customer.”