Open Source Thinking

Now, SAP's existing customers are hearing more and more terms from the open source scene and may be thinking that eventually SAP will also become an open, collaborative, and transparent company.

Far from it - of course SAP adorns itself with the terms from the hip non-profit community, but it does not act in this sense.

The terms such as Hadoop, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Apache Kafka are only used to embellish their own keynotes - as happened once again at the DSAG annual congress:

There, SAP Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert talked about (Apache) Kafka and (SAP) Vora, as can also be read in the DSAG download of the presentation. However, on GitHub, where the Kafka code is available for download, it is noted that Kafka support for Vora will be delivered later and is not yet available.

What now? In the open source community, people are used to honest, open and transparent communication - SAP still has to learn this so that existing customers can believe what they hear.