Following last year’s Think Tank event, three topics became more important for SAP: security, long-term support and co-innovation in our developer community.
Security is vitally important for every single customer. We need to take seriously any detected security vulnerability, including open source software that we are including in our solutions. Making sure that open source software is as secure as our own is an aspect we are looking at systematically, using software development and management tools and processes to ensure we are fulfilling all our security requirements.
As for long-term support, SAP needs to be sure any software shipped to customers survives for many years, because for most of our products we offer support for seven or more years. With open source we are interested in finding solutions that enable us to support our customers for the long term, which is one of the reasons why we now more often actively participate in open source projects. Older versions of open source products often aren’t of great interest to the open source community, but other entities in the OSS ecosystem are stepping up. One example of this is the Eclipse Foundation, where an industry working group, particularly dedicated to long-term support is currently taking shape.
Other sectors, such as the airline industry, could truly benefit from a long-term solution. What we learned at a past Open Source Think Tank in Paris is that top vendors such as Airbus require as much as 40 years of support (!) when they acquire new software. This scenario is especially challenging and requires a systematic solution. It means that, for example, for any piece of software embedded into an airplane, it needs to be ensured that the development environment that was used to build that software can be reconstructed even many years after its last use. Certainly this is an important question to solve for the software vendors working with Airbus and other airplane manufacturers grappling with similar problems.
Finally, several years ago we set up a Code Exchange platform on our SAP Community Network. This allows the more than two million SAP professionals to exchange and jointly develop tools, prototypes and sample applications using the latest SAP and non-SAP development tools. For us, Code Exchange is a means to exchange ideas, get early feedback, learn and utilize innovation from the large community of SAP developers, be they independent or working for SAP customers or partners.
This week’s Think Tank should be another educational experience and I am very hopeful that I will gain new insight into issues we are concerned about at SAP. The discussions we engage in will enable to us to find solutions to our customers’ challenges, allowing SAP to continue to be a major contributor to the open source community worldwide.
