Björn Goerke (SAP)
SAP Cloud Platform is now being deployed by more than 10,000 enterprise customers across the world, as the tech giant takes aim at developers and application builders.
The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering is designed to deliver in-memory capabilities, core platform services and micro-services for building and extending mobile-enabled cloud applications.
Key global customers include Jaguar Land Rover, ExxonMobil and Avast, in addition to Swiss Post, NTT Group and Siemens.
“Innovation and the success of our customers are at the heart of everything we do at SAP,” said Björn Goerke, CTO of SAP. “SAP Cloud Platform is designed to help our customers easily accomplish their digital transformation initiatives to become best-run businesses.
“Now more than 10,000 customers can testify to the flexibility and value SAP Cloud Platform delivers.”
Goerke said the offering provides an “open and agile” platform capable of “unlocking the value of data” through application program interfaces (APIs) to a broader ecosystem of developers.
“For SAP Cloud Platform, open-source and open standards have always been guiding principles to ensure that our customers and partners benefit from the latest development in cloud technology in a non-disruptive manner,” Goerke added.
“At the same time, we abstract complexity away from the app developer, so they can focus on their app functionality, not on the infrastructure needed to run the app.
“We believe that a cutting-edge and future-proof platform can only be achieved through co-innovation and close collaboration among the technology and industry leaders.”
According to Goerke, this is why the vendor joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a founding platinum member in 2014 and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a platinum member in 2017.
“Both Cloud Foundry, the de-facto standard Platform as a Service and Kubernetes, the popular container orchestration technology managed by CNCF are central components of SAP Cloud Platform,” Goerke added.
“SAP is actively contributing to both technologies, with a focus on projects that address enterprise readiness such as security, scalability and interoperability.”
Goerke said SAP has become the second-largest contributor to the Cloud Foundry codebase with close to 100 engineers working on key components, with the vendor also recently open-sourcing Gardener, a technology to provide Kubernetes clusters-as-a-service.
“Overall, we see the development in the cloud native ecosystem as a validation of our strategy and vision of SAP Cloud Platform as an enterprise cloud platform based on cloud-native technologies and we are looking forward to jointly shape the future with our partners for the benefit of our customers,” Goerke said.
