When an AI agent needs to check a supplier's risk profile before approving a purchase order, it cannot do it without trusted data. The supplier record might be in SAP. The contract terms might be in a separate procurement system. The financial health data might be in a third. Without a way to unify those sources into a single consistent record, the agent is working from fragments. SAP's answer to that problem is to own the unification layer. The company announced on March 31, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire Reltio, a master data management provider, to embed its "golden record" capability — a single consistent view of customers, suppliers, products, and operations — directly into SAP's Business Data Cloud. Terms were not disclosed.
The deal is pending regulatory approval and expected to close in Q2 or Q3 2026, subject to customary closing conditions. What makes it worth covering now is the MCP mention buried in the acquisition announcement: Reltio's platform already supports the Model Context Protocol, enabling real-time, multi-agent workflows across SAP and non-SAP environments. An agent running inside SAP's ecosystem can, in principle, query Reltio's golden record directly — getting a supplier's consolidated risk profile, contract status, and compliance standing in a single call, without a human mediating the data retrieval. That is the infrastructure bet SAP is making.
The strategic logic is clear from the announcement. SAP's Business Data Cloud launched in 2025 as the company's unified data layer. Since then, customers have been asking for a more complete master data management solution — the ability to govern and harmonize data across the fullness of the enterprise, not just within SAP's own systems. Reltio fills that gap. Its AI-based entity resolution merges related records from different formats and applications into one reliable record. For an agentic AI system, that unified record is the difference between acting on context and acting on guesswork.
The angle that connects this to the agent infrastructure beat is the MCP layer. Reltio's support for the Model Context Protocol means it functions as a domain-specific data server — the same pattern as Ketryx in medical device compliance or Cotality in property intelligence, but at enterprise scale. The procurement agent example from the announcement is concrete: a Reltio-connected agent can assess supplier risk and trigger actions in near-real-time using trusted data. Whether that actually works in production across heterogeneous IT environments — SAP and non-SAP systems, as the announcement puts it — is an open question pending the deal close. But the architecture is the story.
SAP's own framing makes this explicit: the goal is to move the ERP from a "system of record" to a "system of context" that feeds agentic workflows. That is a meaningful repositioning. A system of record stores what happened. A system of context gives an AI agent the information it needs to act intelligently in the present. The difference matters for anyone building agentic workflows on top of enterprise data.
The competitive picture is worth noting. Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, drew a parallel in CIO: Salesforce made a similar move acquiring Informatica to underpin its Data Cloud. SAP is following the same playbook — buying the data unification layer rather than building it. Whether that is enough to satisfy enterprise customers is the open question. Bickley's verdict, paraphrased from his analysis: SAP is buying the data layer rather than building it, which is a recognizable pattern. The deal has not closed. The integration is unproven. But the direction is clear: master data management is becoming agentic AI infrastructure.
Reltio's 2024 revenue reached $99.2M, up 40.5% from $70.6M in 2023, with approximately 2,000 customers. The company raised $237M total and reached a $1.7B valuation in a 2021 Series D — that valuation may not reflect current market conditions, and no updated terms have been disclosed.
Reltio will remain available as a standalone product for the foreseeable future, per the announcement. The acquisition is expected to close in Q2 or Q3 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
