Jim Zemlin | 27 September 2017
SAP’s increasing participation in the open source software ecosystem shows their growing commitment to open source.
SAP has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as the sixth Platinum level member to join so far this fall. This comes on the heels of the company joining The Linux Foundation’s Open API Initiative on September 24.
SAP is one of the largest and most important makers of enterprise software in the world today. And their increasing participation in the open source software (OSS) ecosystem shows their growing commitment to open source and underscores the value that OSS brings to businesses – even businesses with significant proprietary software revenue lines.
In recent years, we at The Linux Foundation have seen SAP invest more and more resources in open source software. They were early members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and have worked with that group and with Pivotal Labs to build open source tooling for that cloud application platform. SAP also uses many innovative OSS tools in various offerings. For example, their HANA Vora Big Data problem incorporates a number of components of the Apache Hadoop stack. And in Europe, SAP has become a leading advocate for open source technologies.
SAP is becoming a great example of how a company can embrace the new ways of open innovation and leverage those for better relationships with developers, partners, and customers. Across the organization, SAP is diving into newer ways of running its software and delivering services with modern, innovative OSS tools. That ranges from using containers and Kubernetes for orchestrating microservices and breaking down monolithic apps into cloud-native architectures, to pairing big data, machine learning, and analytics tools out of open source with proprietary databases like SAP’s HANA in-memory database.
And all of it, of course, can run on the Linux operating system. Since I am the Executive Director of The Linux Foundation, I’m biased in that regard. At any rate, I wanted to personally welcome SAP into the CNCF and Open API folds. I am confident they will both contribute and gain massively from increased participation our world.