Hybrid clouds with added business value

Hybrid clouds are the first step into the cloud for many SAP customers. They combine private and public clouds to create a hybrid IT landscape that best serves their requirements. Today, SAP offers many new solutions in the cloud model. The digital ERP core and self-developed applications, on the other hand, are still running on-prem for most customers.

The main criteria for a professionally set up and managed hybrid IT landscape are scalability, seamless integration, compliance with company policies, security and open interfaces that provide additional business functionality.

Application Programming Interfaces (API) therefore play an increasingly important role in open hybrid scenarios. Red Hat 3Scale API Management does not see APIs from an exclusively technological perspective, but as a core component of an agile business strategy that integrates distributed services and applications together with containers and integration.

Red Hat OpenShift, based on the Kubernetes container orchestration platform, manages SAP and non-SAP environments, on-premises and in the cloud, from partners or third parties.

This can lead to new innovative business models and additional revenue streams. The well thought-out, professionally managed use of APIs pays off for SAP customers.

API management solutions, such as those offered enterprise-ready by Red Hat, are open, modular, highly scalable, and compatible with SAP Cloud Platform APIs and with virtually all third-party IT systems.

The "power of open source" comes into its own particularly in hybrid cloud scenarios, because the range of services from the cloud is growing every day. Proprietary and semi-proprietary solutions, on the other hand, have a serious disadvantage: they do not give customers the freedom of choice to incorporate those cloud functionalities and services that best serve their needs.

But freedom of choice is essential for market success. APIs help software developers build a new product that ideally opens up new business areas. Everything has to fit together. Proprietary solutions, on the other hand, stifle innovation.

Open API solutions consistently avoid vendor lock-in. They automate processes across enterprise and cloud boundaries. They pave the way for flexible resource allocation, including rights assignment, user and policy management, traffic control, security, and monetization. Red Hat OpenShift manages the entire API lifecycle.

Red Hat OpenShift users can use the 3scale API Gateway to build and run powerful applications in a controlled and automated way. The solutions' highly scalable architecture achieves 99.999 percent availability and is capable of handling hundreds of millions of API calls per day.

API solutions basically have two sides. You need to manage the lifecycle of a single API from start to finish, from creation - for example with Red Hat Fuse - through provisioning and updates to final deletion.

As an organization's API landscape grows to hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of APIs - which happens faster than you think - technology guidelines, team permissions, sufficient scaling, security, analytics, and governance become increasingly important. Powerful API management is able to manage and monetize tens of thousands of APIs in a secure, efficient, scalable, and policy-compliant manner.

In the API economy, every company is both a consumer and producer of functionality, data and services. SAP customers, for example, could offer the IoT data collected via a Red Hat Intelligent Gateway via an API and thus open up new revenue streams.