At Cloud Foundry Summit Berlin, SAP’s Matthias Steiner and Bernd Krannich will talk about the company’s early moves in the PaaS market. In this installment of our ongoing Summit Q&A series, Matthias gives us a peek at their talk, “SAP and Cloud Foundry: Love at Second Sight.”
How did you get involved in Cloud Foundry?
We have been watching Cloud Foundry since its inception in 2011. Back at the time we were evaluating whether or not it would be a good foundation for our own cloud platform plans. For a variety of reasons we decided to go a different path and based our PaaS offering on top of other open-source projects such as the Eclipse Virgo project. Then in 2013 we re-evaluated the market situation and it got obvious that some of our initial concerns (e.g. missing governance model) were no longer justified and hence we joined the Foundation as a Platinum member.
Matthias Steiner
What are you speaking about at Cloud Foundry Summit Berlin?
My colleague Bernd Krannich and myself will share tales from the trenches and recap on our road towards a Cloud Foundry based cloud platform. We’ll talk about the early days of our journey, our approach to PaaS and why we believe that open standards & open-source are the only option for Platform-as-a-Service offering. Of course, that includes “lessons learned” and talking about some of the obstacles and challenges we faced and things of that nature.
What do you hope people will learn from your talk?
Ultimately we hope that the attendees will benefit from our session by taking away some of our “lessons learned”. Implementing a Cloud Foundry based PaaS is not something to take lightly and as such it’s always good to hear from others who have already been there. I believe that SAP’s position in the enterprise space and our approach to delivering a global, enterprise-grade cloud platform provides a unique perspective to learn from. Last, but nor least we also want to shed some light on some of the key contributions people and companies in the Cloud Foundry community can expect from SAP going forward.
What excites you about being part of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem?
At SAP, we believe that Cloud Foundry is well positioned to establish itself as the de-facto PaaS standard on the market. Having a standardised foundation for PaaS is extremely important for a variety of reasons such as to avoid vendor lock-in, which ultimately helps to accelerate adoption of cloud computing. It’s great to be part of an ecosystem that shares a common foundation and we are ready to do our part.
