SUSE & SAP S/4HANA @ SAPPHIRE NOW 2018: “Opening” June 5

The perennial venue for SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW Conference – the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando

That SAP is friendly to the Open Source software community isn’t really news, right? Going back more than a decade and a half, there are countless examples that show SAP exploring, testing and certifying their solutions on Linux variants. SAP developers are indeed important contributors to a number of open source projects. SAP has adopted OpenStack and Ceph as foundational elements for SAP Cloud Platform and has joined Cloud Foundry Foundation in order to keep pace with and contribute to the evolution of open source software-defined infrastructure technologies such as containers and orchestration.

SAP S/4HANA, not to mention Leonardo, provide further examples of SAP’s core adoption of open source to take on the role of providing the underpinnings for their licensed software business. This greatly simplifies the support matrix that SAP and its partners have to consider. Supporting only Linux for HANA and, by extension, for S/4HANA eliminates many pre-release testing, qualification and ongoing support concerns for SAP.  We at SUSE appreciate this important evolution. By appreciate, I mean that we understand the business decision that SAP has made *and* we recognize the value this brings to our business.

As the provider of perhaps the most widely-used set of business applications on the planet, SAP has built a vast and impressive ecosystem in which other information technology companies (like SUSE) participate. Certainly all the big server, storage and network equipment makers play here, as do hundreds of service providers and thousands of ISVs and smaller integrators. But quite possibly no other technology company in recent history has shown the depth of commitment to SAP and SAP’s customers’ mission that SUSE has.

SUSE’s commitment to SAP customers was in evidence in our release of SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP Applications in 2012. And in our close collaboration with hardware vendors such as HPE, IBM, Lenovo, Cisco, Dell EMC, Fujitsu and others to deliver SAP HANA appliances and to help smooth the path to HANA adoption early on. And more recently, in our important developments in the areas of open source systems management and zero downtime for SAP landscapes, including our integrated high availability solutions. We are fully committed to bring the benefits of open source – and SUSE’s unique approach to the SAP market – to every SAP customer.  This started with R/3 & NetWeaver/ECC on Oracle and DB2 and continues today with HANA, S/4HANA, BW4/HANA and Leonardo and all that entails.

If you are able to attend SAPPHIRE in Orlando on June 5-7, please make it a point to come see us in the S/4HANA kiosk in the huge SUSE booth near the dining hall at location #859.  We’ll be ready, willing and able to go into as much detail as you like there.  And/or check out our comprehensive set of materials on SUSE and SAP on https://www.suse.com/programs/transitioningtosap  – and thanks.