IP versus OS

Licenses were issued for these ERP add-ons and maintenance was charged. It was and is a profitable business for SAP partners and a good service and offer for existing customers.

With the arrival of Linux in the SAP community, the IT service paradigm changed: software is free of charge, service and customizing is charged for. This has not made Suse Linux rich, but it has established itself very well and successfully in the SAP community.

With this business model, Red Hat has even achieved a value of around 30 billion US dollars, based on the price IBM was prepared to pay.

The SAP partner community is still organized according to the established software licensing model and rightly has concerns about its intellectual property.

I asked SAP CEO Christian Klein about this challenge and he was a little surprised, but also said that he wanted to make contact with the partners in this regard.

The fact is, however, that the SW scene is changing. Business Application Programming Interfaces (SAP BAPIs) should be transformed as apps on the SAP Cloud Platform and GitHub.

These apps could not only be open source, but also developed with tools such as Mendix, SAP Cloud Platform for Rapid Application Development. Naturally, SAP also provides Abap for the SCP, but the future probably looks different: Open Source and Rapid Application Development.