This year, SAP is again sponsoring and participating in the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), which is scheduled for May 21-22 in San Francisco, California. The conference is centered around three major themes that SAP - no real suprise here - has already been focusing on for quite some time: mobile, big data and cloud computing. In the different conference tracks, it will be explored how open source software and open source development principles support key innovations in these areas.
For SAP it will be interesting to find ways on how to combine key SAP technology innovations with relevant open source technologies to eventually utilize innovation from the open source community and create more complete solutions for our customers. In this regard, we are preparing a demo how SAP HANA can interoperate with key open source technologies such as Hadoop and R. While Hadoop is gaining traction in the industry, one scenario to explore further is how to enable the growing number of data nodes that support the Hadoop Distrbuted File System to act as a data source in HANA. Having a common and reliable approach on how to implement this scenario might be of interest to customers in various industries. As for R, there is already quite some interest and experimentation on the In-Memory Business Data Management and SAP HANA space on how to make use of R (the language) and its statistical and data mining features. The interesting fact about R is that many end users (mostly statisticians) share and co-develop many packages that include algorithms for specific purposes. Allowing these packages and the statisticians' skill sets to be reused in an SAP context does make a lot of sense and will represent the second part of the demo. Please note that both integration scenarios are still in an experimentation phase, but we are looking for interest and feedback from SAP and non-SAP users.
Also, together with Steve George, General Manager, Canonical and Paolo Juvara, CEO, Openbravo, I will participate in a panel on Success Factors for Enterprise Open Source Adoption. We want to explore how end-user organizations are adopting open source - pretty much along the lines of what I recently presented in my webinar on the same topic.
So, if you are interested to come to OSBC as well, attend the various sessions and meet the SAP gang, please let me know at claus dot von dot riegen at sap dot com - I have a few free tickets still avaiable.
