SAP Teams With Cloud Foundry, OpenStack
SAP, the German enterprise software giant, is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation and OpenStack Foundation open source communities.
The vendor also rolled out at an open source convention in Portland, Oregon, two cloud-based tools – one for SAP HANA plus another called SAP River Rapid Development Environment.
“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," Bjoern Goerke, SAP's executive vice president for products and innovation technology, said in a statement announcing the moves.
SAP appears to have its bases covered with its membership in the pair of open source groups. Cloud Foundry focuses on open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) frameworks while OpenStack concentrates on controller software for infrastructure-as-a-service clouds.
SAP said it would join Cloud Foundry as a platinum member. It will act as an "active consumer" in the OpenStack community and contribute to its open source code base. The memberships will allow more developers to "code in the cloud," the company stressed.
SAP began collaborating with Cloud Foundry late last year with a code contribution and the availability of a service broker for SAP HANA. The service broker, developed with partner (and VMware spinoff) Pivotal Software and available as open source code on GitHub, allows Cloud Foundry applications to connect to in-memory capabilities in SAP HANA.
SAP said its collaboration with the OpenStack community would focus on management of enterprise clouds. In the process, the company added, it would leverage OpenStack and Cloud Foundry offerings for its platforms, developers, customers and partners.
SAP repeatedly stressed in announcing the partnerships that it wants to expand its open technology platform while broadening its involvement with developers. As examples, it cited a recent agreement with Databricks, founded by the creators of Apache Spark, to develop a Spark distribution for integration with SAP HANA based on Apache Spark 1.0.
SAP has also contributed portions of its SAPUI5 framework as open source code on the GitHub site under an Apache Version 2.0 license.
Meanwhile, the cloud-based tools are intended to help developers build applications on top of the SAP HANA cloud platform, its in-memory PaaS offering. This will allow developers to build and run applications on SAP HANA in the cloud.
SAP's new partners had little to say about the new collaboration. OpenStack did fire off a tweet trumpeting SAP's decision to become a foundation sponsor, calling "another win for the enterprise."
During this week's convention in Portland, SAP also sought to underscore its commitment to open source with presentations on its OpenUI5, its enterprise-grade HTML5 user interface library. The program stressed that the library has recently been "open-sourced."
The enterprise software vendor has made similar open source announcements involving SAP HANA at recent company sponsored events.
