SAP Deepens Commitment to Containers and Kubernetes to Help Modernize Enterprise Applications

SAN FRANCISCO – October 11, 2017 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes and Prometheus, today announced that SAP has joined the CNCF as a platinum member. Stronger ties to cloud native communities will help SAP expedite customers’ transition to containerized and microservice-based infrastructure. As part of the membership, Björn Goerke, president SAP Cloud Platform and chief technology officer at SAP, will join CNCF’s Governing Board.

SAP is the 6th new platinum member to sign up this fall, joining AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Pivotal and VMware. SAP will work collectively with more than 120 CNCF members to make cloud native technologies as accessible and reliable as possible to customers and to foster growth of the larger ecosystem.

SAP is observing a growing trend in the industry to adopt containers for running large workloads as an alternative to virtualization. Availability of technologies like open source Kubernetes both on-premises and in the cloud provides flexibility for migration of workloads between environments to meet critical business needs. The increasing momentum behind the standardization of container orchestration technology via CNCF is also conducive for a stronger ecosystem and richer solutions for enterprises.

“With the largest enterprise application software provider joining CNCF, Kubernetes and containers are the direction businesses are heading,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We’re excited to have SAP on board working with other CNCF members, including the six largest public cloud providers, to help enterprises adopt cloud native as quickly and easily as possible.”

SAP has been using Kubernetes internally for some time both in its production services and in its Concur subsidiary, and intends to work with additional CNCF projects to bring added containerization and orchestration advances to enterprises. Additionally, as a platinum member of both CNCF and the Cloud Foundry Foundation, SAP will strive to provide both customer choice in cloud application deployment strategies as well as points of integration and partnership between these two important open source organizations.

“SAP is investing in partnerships that we believe will modernize the enterprise,” said Björn Goerke, president SAP Cloud Platform and chief technology officer at SAP. “Cloud native technologies like Kubernetes and containers are key to enabling that process. We have found Kubernetes to be a modern, matured cluster management software and orchestration engine for SAP’s own projects designed with container-based architecture. Our decision to join CNCF as a platinum member reflects the importance of open source and cloud-native computing for SAP in making enterprise software relevant in every environment.”

SAP is also a member of The Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Project and Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Additional Resources

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of cloud native software stacks including Kubernetes, Fluentd, linkerd, Prometheus, OpenTracing, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy and Jaeger. CNCF serves as the neutral home for collaboration and brings together the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors – including the six largest public cloud providers and many of the leading private cloud companies. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit: https://www.cncf.io/.

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