DEC Virus, OpenStack & Cloud Foundry

While I speculate about the past and future of the IT scene over a good glass of red wine, my wife says:

"I'm looking forward to your end-of-year column - probably eerily beautiful with lots of wine."

After clearing out the attic, my wife persuaded me to consolidate my wine cellar. And two magnum bottles from Gerd Oswald's vineyard were also found. He will soon have more time for his vineyard and dog breeding.

However, we are also facing numerous changes in the community. The legendary Ken Olsen's Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) has failed and been taken over by PC portable pioneer Compaq. Compaq failed and was taken over by Hewlett-Packard.

HP has failed and is trying again as a double pack - this will also fail. Because although they were committed to OpenStack, the HP cloud project failed.

EMC is being acquired by Dell because the storage manufacturer was frozen in its success. I know what I'm talking about: For years, I followed the negotiations of my base team with EMC.

Each new project was again cumbersome, tedious and lengthy. Dell will use the EMC customer file and handle the rest. Our Head of IT Infrastructure is a firm believer in open source; besides, he belongs to the small group of SAP Hana fans.

He thinks that the Software Defined Datacenter is set and will most likely be based on open source - maybe he's right. Just in time for my column, the new issue of SAP's Release Strategy landed on my desk.

My Head of CCC personally brought me the 2015 edition with the publication date November 12. While leafing through it, I found an extremely remarkable picture on page 76, which Editor-in-Chief Färbinger was kind enough to print. It shows a section of the SAP architecture model.

Note the base (blue bar): Infrastructure Services at SAP Data Centers with the OpenStack logo on the left and the Cloud Foundry logo on the right.

In the current SAP Release Strategy, my Walldorf friends clearly commit to open source. OpenStack has been a topic of conversation in Walldorf since early 2015, and an initial implementation at the SAP data center in St. Leon-Rot was completed last summer.

Cloud Foundry, on the other hand, is relatively new. Of course, I was informed about this in good time from Walldorf. So I also sent two employees to SUSECon in Amsterdam at the beginning of November and two to the Cloud Foundry Summit in Berlin, where SAP was one of the main sponsors.

Who is also involved in OpenStack and Cloud Foundry are our colleagues from Fujitsu. The always well-informed and gifted speaker Joseph Reger, CTO at Fujitsu EMEIA, spoke about Open Source at the Fujitsu Forum in Munich in mid-November. He is also in contact with SAP board member Oswald - which brings us full circle again.