From Data Chaos to AI Impact: Rethinking the Enterprise Data Foundation
Webinar Speaker: Fern Halper, TDWI VP Research, Senior Research Director for Advanced Analytics
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2026
Time: 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET
As organizations accelerate their move to AI and agentic systems, the pressure to modernize the data foundation has intensified. TDWI research shows that supporting AI is the top priority for data management initiatives. Yet many organizations are still struggling at the data layer: dealing with fragmented environments, heavy data replication, brittle pipelines, inconsistent governance, and the loss of business context when data is extracted and rebuilt in downstream platforms. These challenges delay analytics and weaken AI outcomes.
Join TDWI’s VP of research, Fern Halper, and experts from SAP and Snowflake as they discuss why a semantically rich data foundation is essential for scaling trusted AI and how to build one. They will discuss how the SAP-Snowflake partnership helps to deliver a modern data foundation that reduces unnecessary replication, preserves business context, and delivers high-fidelity, AI-ready data products across environments.
Topics include:
- The AI data foundation – what is needed
- Building a zero-copy business data fabric with SAP and Snowflake
- Building AI applications grounded in business data
- Ensuring governed and semantically rich data
Guest Speakers
Katryn Cheng
Sr. Director, Product Marketing
SAP Data & Analytics
Katryn Cheng is a business and technology leader with over 20 years of experience in data and analytics. Her current role as Senior Director of Product Marketing at SAP involves driving strategic partnerships, field go-to-market, business accelerators, and successful adoption of SAP data and analytics solutions. Previously, she's held multiple roles in solutions go-to-market, field readiness & operations, and solution advisory—partnering closely with customers, partners, and global stakeholders to ensure success with SAP solutions.
Edy Sardilli
Global Business Leader for the SAP GTM and Alliances
Snowflake
Edy Sardilli is Snowflake's Global Business Leader for the SAP GTM and Alliances. He is shaping how Snowflake and SAP bring a unified vision for data, AI, and enterprise transformation to market. A longtime leader in the SAP ecosystem, he previously held leadership roles spanning Analytics, AI + Data, Cloud Platform, Strategic Sales and GTM. His career has followed the changing role of enterprise data, from analytics and cloud adoption to today’s AI-driven strategies.
Date: April 16, 2026
Time: 9:00 am PT
Fern Halper, Ph.D.