We take a look at the SAP press release from July 22nd(it can be found here) in our usual commentary style.
Here we go:
PORTLAND, Ore. — July 22, 2014 — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) is committed to an open platform for customers and partners to run their businesses in real time in the cloud. SAP today announced that it has become a sponsor of two key open source communities: Cloud Foundry®, the industry-leading open platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and the OpenStack foundation, delivering the industry-leading open infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). In addition, SAP announced new cloud-based developer tools SAP HANA® Answers and SAP® River Rapid Development Environment. The announcements were made at the O'Reilly OSCON Open Source Convention, held July 20-24 in Portland, Oregon.
“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.”
MyPOV – There have been rumors and half clear news around SAP endorsing OpenStack and Cloud Foundry – this one clarifies, formalizes the direction. Both announcements are not surprises, the real question is – what took SAP so long to formalize these: I had the chance to meet Bjoern Goerke the other week in Walldorf and my impression is that there is more of a push towards an openness in regards of Open Source and related initiatives with large mindshare and probably industry leading position like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. My main takeaway of meeting Goerke was that it certainly has helped his understanding of customers and deployment methodologies serving a sting in IT as SAP CIO. Good for SAP customers and SAP.
And while it is pretty clear what SAP could and needs to do with OpenStack – it is more of an open process with Cloud Foundry. SAP has its own ambitions around creating its own programming language (with River – my takes are here) on the other side of the spectrum is the full endorsement similar to what IBM has done with BlueMix (my takeaways on the launch here). In the middle of that spectrum could be being a good technology provider and e.g. allow for Cloud Foundry Applications to use HANA, maybe BI tools etc.
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 other the 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.
MyPOV – Well ok here it is. In my view that is too conservative for SAP potentially – as it may well have to endorse Cloud Foundry beyond this point. SAP customers may use Cloud Foundry more than SAP may like – and with that force SAP to open up its future ‘simple’ S Suite to Cloud Foundry PaaS projects. So the relationship of Cloud Foundry will be a marker on the SAP PaaS / tool strategy in regards of how SAP sees its chances to create (and keep for ABAP) and grow a developer community around SAP products and tools. Personally I remain skeptical – as blogged here. On the flipside SAP could well come up soon with the use cases that justify the proprietary nature of River with productivity gains in the problem domain (most likely business applications) that it tries to address. Similar to Salesforce.com that justifies its APEX tools / platform and environment with the productivity gains to build enterprise applications.
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.
MyPOV – An overdue move by SAP. OpenStack is pretty much the only option for data center virtualization for SAP – unless it wants (or needs to) endorse the GAMO (Google / Amazon / Microsoft / Oracle) cloud vendors. But that is not in SAP’s immediate interest. If SAP becomes a full hearted contributor to OpenStack it will only help OpenStack – as SAP will bring a much needed enterprise application perspective to the consortium. Key cloud application problems like data residency, data masking etc. that are not addressed in the overall industry could be tackled. But like every OpenStack member, SAP will need to decide if it wants to contribute to the group – or keep vital, differentiating capabilities to itself…
Closer to the datacenter this will give SAP more options on the hardware side as all major hardware vendors support OpenStack (even SAP foe Oracle by now). SAP could be (with other large users) a welcome force to keep OpenStack standards from fragmenting as we have seen it with UNIX and Linux before. A more ambitious OpenStack strategy – that may well be in the books for SAP – would be to get its own OpenStack distribution. SAP certainly has the load and market presence for business applications to try to pull this off.
P.S. The header says ‘SAP sponsors OpenStack Foundation’ – but then never elaborates where this sponsorship is going, mainly what level SAP would select with OpenStack.
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.
MyPOV – The partnership with Databricks around Spark is an important step as it makes Hadoop accessible in a performant way for HANA developers. But it is a ‘co-existence’ strategy of doing HANA and Hadoop – and SAP remains one of the few vendors out there doing this (e.g. both SAS and Teradata have moved off the ‘co-existence’ strategy remarkably). It is encouraging to see from my meetings in Walldorf this week that the other way around – of bringing Hadoop style (ok Spark) queries into HANA. In my view the relationship between HANA and Hadoop needs to be an equal peer relationship, in order to bring the enterprise side of data (granted – RAM like fast) into the (ever getting faster) Hadoop queries. The key learning is that the real insights are in bringing the structured (HANA) data and the unstructured (Hadoop) data - not the other way around.
And certainly kudos for SAP to contribute to Open Source for node.js and the addition of the SAPUI5 framework (wondering on the uptake / success here).
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. Developers can get started easily with free trial versions for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform here.
MyPOV – Good to see SAP using the PaaS term now, though stumbling the in memory PaaS offering for the first time, may well have been my oversight. SAP needs to make the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) a success if it really wants to get developer mindshare. Enabling partnerships – or even using large PaaS offerings like CloudFoundry would be a key step. As or the River RDE – I remain skeptical till I have seen the productivity justification of learning, using and honing skills in a new programming language – vs. e.g. Java and other popular Java byte compatible languages and frameworks.
Bottom Line
Good to see SAP clarify relationships with two key cloud Open Source players – OpenStack and CloudFoundry. But many more questions remain. SAP needs to describe (and find) is strategy in regards of OpenStack (just a participant or a key contributor) which goes hand in hand with its datacenter virtualization and management strategy. As for CloudFoundry SAP first needs to clarify what the moving parts are – as there could be multiple products and with that continuums that SAP could play in regards of how ‘intense’ the CloudFoundry embrace is. But in fairness to SAP – first steps need to be taken first – and even if you want to run – the first steps are slow and small (at least at my age). First steps set a direction though and many will be watching where the SAP run with Open Source will head to.