TechEd 2021: Open Source as Strategic Task for SAP

[sebastian_wolf]

It’s that time of the year again: SAP TechEd 2021 is about to start soon! As every year, your schedule might already be overbooked with interesting lectures, hands-on sessions and other content to catch up with the latest developments in the SAP universe. But no matter what you have already planned this year, you certainly don’t want to miss our session about the strategic importance of open source for SAP!

Why Open Source is relevant

In this lecture you will learn how important open source technologies are these days for any progress in the field, no matter if we are talking about cloud-native computing, operating systems, development tools and programming languages or machine learning. We will cover some historic aspects of the free software movements and explain different licenses in open source projects with some recommendations about which ones to choose in specific enterprise contexts.

SAP’s mission and achievements in open source

As michael.picht already outlined in his blog post about how SAP manages open source software with an Open Source Program Office (OSPO), our journey with open source has already been quite long and we will continue to grow and extend it even further. As said: The SAP OSPO is the central entry point for all open source-related aspects at SAP. It is our mission to support and enable all SAP teams to benefit from open source while managing the associated risks and challenges. As we will show you in our lecture, this support and enablement has already materialized in a lot of projects, especially in the SAP Business Technology Platform. We are both contributing to world-leading open source projects such as Kubernetes, CloudFoundry or OpenJDK and maintaining central elements of the Business Technology Platform as open source projects, such as Gardener, Kyma or OpenUI5.

What is in for you?

Our open source engagement is motivated by a variety of goals. While the benefits of using open source projects in SAP products and services are clear, the advantages of own contributions to third-party projects or the publication of own open source projects might not be as obvious at the first glance. In the end, all our stakeholders, like customers, partners, and of course developers, benefit from our open source contributions. Customers and partners, for example, reduce their vendor lock-in, can integrate with or extend SAP solutions more easily and hence reduce their total cost of ownership. Developers do not only have simple access to the code to learn and collaborate, but they can also have a concrete influence on the future development of our products and enhance their personal brand by contributing fixes and features.

Join our session!

These and many more aspects will be covered in the lecture DEV112 – Learn about Open Source at SAP. It will be broadcast on

Thursday, November 18 at 08:30 AM CET.

If you have questions that our session can’t answer or that you always wanted to ask us, simply have them ready, the SAP OSPO team will be there to answer them.

Moreover, there will also be a couple of other open source-related sessions at this year’s TechEd. So, if you are interested in more details about our open source products and services and their role in the SAP Business Technology Platform, look at the following sessions:

• DEV105: Manage your Kubernetes-based SAP extensions in SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime


• DEV110: SAP BTPs Unified Runtime Strategy


• DEV160: Scaling Application Development leveraging SAPUI5


• DEV261: Building extensions with SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime

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If you wish to learn more about SAP Open Source:

Learn more: Webinars | Podcasts | SAP Community

Explore: Engagement in Projects & Foundations

Engage: GitHub

Follow us on: Twitter

[vobu]

couldn't agree more with the sentiment that Open Source is a strategic task for SAP: it's becoming the predominant thing for establishing trust both for software users and devs - and it will become the primary driver for developer adoption and attraction.

all of that shows with UI5, and now recently, with the Open UX Tools.

so what about finally Open Sourcing CAP and get ecosystem traction also outside SAPverse? TechEd would be a good time… 🙂

[sebastian_wolf]

Thanks for your feedback, Volker!

We've heard all the community voices regarding CAP, but unfortunately I can't comment on the status of the discussions around that topic.

[vobu]

unfortunately this only highlights the dichotomy many of us perceive that SAP has with Open Source: it's not only about the binary state whether source code is publicly available. Open Source is at least as much about communicating on way towards releasing sources and/or about the drawbacks. It's about embracing the community to be part of a journey to jointly improve software. In the end, think of it like Scuba diving - it‘s possible to do it alone, but safer in a buddy team and really great if friends do it together.

[peter_giese]

Please rest assured that we are determined to take our open source co-innovation journey together with you as our buddy team and friends. I would be more than happy to jump on a call with you on this.

[vobu]

as mentioned on twitter, i gladly accept that offer for a joint call! probably even make an „open source@sap community call“ out of it? i‘m pretty sure i‘m not the only one from the sap devs community interested in the topic 🙂