SAP made one of the most heavily promoted news announcements in recent history. But why SAP Business Data Cloud, and why now? The answer, as expected, leads us right back to AI. Here's my initial take - along with user group reactions.

As autonomous agents spread across the vendor landscape, SAP is banking on the rich stores of enterprise data that flow through its ERP software to draw customers to cloud. The analytics and AI solution announced Thursday is the latest migration enticement the company has added to its growing SaaS portfolio.

In late January, SAP boosted its financial outlook for the year, fueled by AI. The stock is up 69% in the past year. Databricks, meanwhile, is privately held with a $62 billion valuation and is among the companies of greatest interest to Wall Street regarding a potential IPO.

SAP is partnering with Databricks to offer advanced data science and AI capabilities within Business Data Cloud.

The company also announced a partnership with enterprise data processing and AI company Databricks Inc. The collaboration natively embeds Databrick’s technology for data engineering, machine learning and AI workloads into SAP’s cloud solution.