SAP commits to CloudFoundry, OpenStack; announces cloud-based developer tools

SAP said it has become a sponsor of two key open source communities Cloud Foundry and OpenStack foundation. Cloud Foundry is an open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and the OpenStack foundation delivers the open infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

In addition, the company 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. “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.”

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. The company said it will act as an active consumer in the OpenStack community and make contributions to the open source code base.

SAP’s new cloud-based developer tools are aimed at enabling developers to 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.

In June the company announced the beta release of SAP River RDE as part of SAP HANA Cloud Platform.