SAP Cloud Platform and Cloud Foundry: What Does It Mean for Partners?

All platforms are not created equal. Case in point: the new release of SAP Cloud Platform offers Cloud Foundry services that will allow customers, partners, and developers build compelling applications “powered by SAP Leonardo.” SAP is a key member and contributor of the Cloud Foundry community-based platform – one of the most dynamic open source projects on the market today. Cloud Foundry differentiates itself from other open source platforms through its enterprise-grade architecture, portability, and multi-cloud functions, and open standards protocols.

I will concentrate my post on two key points: the importance of Cloud Foundry to SAP’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) strategy, and how SAP Cloud Platform differentiates from other offerings based on Cloud Foundry. Both points are critical to the ecosystem-based business model of SAP Cloud Platform that helps ensure rapid commercial success for partners as they innovate and leverage the SAP Leonardo services delivered on the platform. At SAP Leonardo Live, we announced the first set of SAP Leonardo services for partners with a Build engagement model in our SAP PartnerEdge program – with the introduction of SAP IoT development packs for partners that can be used with the recently launched Cloud Foundry packages for SAP Cloud Platform.

An increasing amount of “mode 2” or edge-based innovation is enabling digital transformation of critical business processes. Consequently, any agility layer, such as that in SAP Cloud Platform, must be enterprise grade to ensure customers that partner innovation is reliable, relevant, and scalable. With an eye to maximize their return on investment, partners can develop an application and have it run on any Cloud Foundry distribution for increased market opportunity. Customers benefit from innovation across the entire Cloud Foundry ecosystem by having access to more choice of applications. A standards-based, open source project also establishes a high degree of confidence that platform innovation will continue at pace – protecting partner and customer investments.

Now let’s turn to how SAP differentiates its Cloud Foundry services through content access, industry expertise, and ecosystem vibrancy.

Core SAP ERP applications (“mode 1”) touch 76% of global transactions. Given digital transformation (mode 2) is largely a strategy of extensibility, as a partner you will want to build and integrate application extensions to the most relevant business data, which happens to be in the systems of SAP customers. Digital transformation increasingly requires business process to function across industries. With over 45 years of in-depth industry experience, we are capturing our best practices as microservices that can be reused and re-orchestrated, allowing partners to differentiate themselves by rethinking customers’ business challenges. With the launch of the SAP IoT development packs for partners, our ecosystem of 700 partners with Build engagements can now build innovative and differentiated IoT-based applications that natively extend to our growing SAP Leonardo digital innovation system; this provides choice to customers, grows our overall value proposition, and allows our partners to differentiate themselves. And, because delivering maximum business value requires crowd-sourced innovation, we are tapping into our overall 15,000 partners to deliver cutting-edge innovation, at scale, on SAP Cloud Platform.

SAP Cloud Platform and Cloud Foundry services including our new SAP Leonardo services offer choice, flexibility, and enterprise-grade innovation. @SAPCP

Stay tuned for a follow-up blog on the importance of the ecosystem for SAP Cloud Platform.