SAP Commits to Cloud Foundry and OpenStack for Development in the Cloud
SAP today announced that it has become a sponsor of two key open source communities: Cloud Foundry and the OpenStack Foundation. In addition, SAP announced new cloud-based developer tools SAP HANA Answers and SAP River Rapid Development Environment.
“The developer and open source community are key to breakthrough technology innovation,” said Bjoern Goerke, executive vice president, Products and Innovation Technology, SAP SE. “Through the CloudFoundry and OpenStack initiatives, as well as new developer tools, SAP deepens its commitment to the developer community and enables them to innovate and code in the cloud.”
Fostering Innovation with Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry is the industry-leading open PaaS fostering innovation in the industry. As an announced Platinum Member of Cloud Foundry, SAP is actively collaborating with the other founding members to create a foundation that enables the development of next-generation cloud applications. As initial steps of the Cloud Foundry collaboration, in recent months SAP announced the code contribution and availability of a Cloud Foundry service broker for SAP HANA. Developed in close association with Pivotal and available as open source on GitHub, the service broker will allow any Cloud Foundry application to connect to and leverage the in-memory capabilities of SAP HANA.
SAP Sponsors the OpenStack Foundation
SAP is committed to an open cloud platform that will meet the needs of its customers and partners. To this end, SAP will act as an active consumer in the OpenStack community and make contributions to the open source code base. In addition, SAP has significant expertise in managing enterprise clouds, and its contributions will focus on enhancing OpenStack for those scenarios. Since SAP is leveraging OpenStack and Cloud Foundry for its platform, developers, customers and partners will be able to take advantage of the latest cloud technologies.
The new open source partnerships are a significant step in SAP’s strategy to provide an open technology platform and deepen its commitment to the developer community. SAP recently announced an agreement with Databricks — the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark — to deliver a Spark distribution for integration with SAP HANA platform that is based on Apache Spark 1.0. In December 2013, SAP announced contributions to the open source community, such as the SAP HANA database client via GitHub site that enables developers to efficiently connect Node.js applications to SAP HANA. Also, SAP contributed key portions of the SAPUI5 framework as open source code on the GitHub site under an Apache Version 2.0 license.
New Cloud-Based Developer Tools
SAP announced new cloud-based developer tools aiming to enable developers to easily start building applications on top of SAP HANA Cloud Platform, the in-memory PaaS offering from SAP, enabling customers and developers to build, extend and run applications on SAP HANA in the cloud. SAP HANA Answers is a knowledge hub website for developers providing fast access to SAP HANA information and expertise in the cloud. Via the SAP HANA Answers plugin, the site is directly accessible from the SAP HANA Studio, an Eclipse-based integrated developer environment (IDE) for administration and end-to-end application and content development for SAP HANA. SAP HANA Answers is a single point of entry for developers to find documentation, implement or troubleshoot all things SAP HANA. As part of creating a rich developer experience, in June the company announced the beta release of SAP River RDE as part of SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
