SAP Open Source Year in Review – Part 4

[peter_giese]

Year in Review

  

This is the fourth and last part of our miniseries: 

• Part 1 – Contributions to Open Source


• Part 2 – Examples of SAP Open Source Projects 


• Part 3 – Empowering our Developers  


• Part 4 – External Communication about SAP Open Source  

 

Part 4 - External Communication

 

“You Never Know When a Moment and a few Sincere Words can have an Impact on a Life” 

 

New Podcast Series ‘The Open Source Way’

In October, we launched our new open source podcast series “The Open Source Way”, to provide further insights into SAP’s open source engagement. It is available on openSAP, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify and TuneIn. Every two weeks, open source enthusiasts and experts share best practices, present projects, processes, or achievements and inform you what is new about Open Source at SAP. 

New Open Source Twitter Channel 

In 2020, we also created our new “SAP Open Source" (@sapopensource) Twitter channel to interact with the open source community and our ecosystem. Follow us to stay up to date about all aspects of open source at SAP. 

Presentations at External Events

• InnerSource Commons Summit: Guilherme Dellagustin and Michael Graf gave a presentation about “Growing an InnerSource Culture at SAP” at the virtual InnerSource Commons conference in April 2020. You can find more information about the talk and content in Guilherme's blog post. 


• GitHub Enterprise Roadshow: Fabienne Haag and Amani Hajj Ali presented the new “SAP Open Source Outbound Process” at the GitHub Enterprise Roadshow in Munich in January and explained how it enables developers to easily and quickly start a new open source project and contribute to existing open source projects, while being compliant and secure. 


• Cyber Security Month: SAP presented Open Source and Security topics during Cyber Security Month in North America.


• O4B virtual event: Technology decision makers at large European corporations, Founders and CEOs of European open source startups and VCs met at a two-day interactive virtual event, O4B 2020, held at the beginning of October. SAP was the main ‘patron’ sponsor and a keynote speaker in the topic section “Enterprise Open Source Strategy”. The recording of the SAP keynote “Open Source – A Triple Win” presented by Sebastian Wolf, is available on YouTube. 


• InnerSource Commons Summit: In September, SAP contributed the presentation “The Unexpected Path of Applying InnerSource Patterns” held by our SAP InnerSource ambassadors Michael Graf and Harish B to the virtual InnerSource Commons Fall 2020 Summit. In their talk, Michael and Harish shared their experiences with applying InnerSource Commons patterns and pointed out the unexpected synergies along the way. In addition, they demonstrated SAP’s new InnerSource portal. 


• EclipseCon2020, the leading conference for developers, architects, and open source business leaders to learn about Eclipse technologie and share best practices, opened its virtual doors from October 19-22. As platinum member of the Eclipse Foundation, SAP was represented with a virtual exhibition booth and sessions featuring our projects Dirigible (“What is Low Code Development?”) and Steady (“Vulnerability data about open source software should be open too!”).


• Linux Foundation Open Source Summit Europe: Peter Giese, head of the Open Source Program Office at SAP, gave a presentation about the evolution of SAP’s outbound process from its initial state that often took several weeks to its current form that only takes a few days. The process workflow is automated and executed via GitHub. This way, our developers and our OSPO members benefit from using the same tooling that allows them to have full transparency of the status of any given request while being able to manage open source projects at scale with enterprise-grade quality and security. 


• SAP TechEd 2020: A quote by SAP mentor Morten Wittrock nicely summarizes the open source experience at this year’s TechEd: “As someone who’s been following and taking part in open source projects of the SAP world for many years now, it was very heartening to see open source be so present at this year’s SAP TechEd. Not only in the sessions specifically about SAP open source projects such as Kyma and Gardener, but also across the board. SAP is on a very interesting journey when it comes to open source, and I’m really excited to see what the coming years will bring.” For an overview of all open source related workshops and lectures at TechEd, you can read more in this blog post. 


• Open Core Summit Digital 2020, the second annual COSS (Commercial Open-Source) ecosystem conference, focused on illuminating the intersection of open source and business: Michael Picht presented topics of the SAP Open Source Program Office: processes and tooling for outbound open source and SAP's approach to promoting InnerSource inside the company. 


• The “Corona-Warn-App” was definitely one of the most prominent open source projects in 2020. As a consequence, SAP representatives talked about their experiences during the development on several occasions. Of course, we cannot name them all, but we will pick a few: Project lead Martin Fassunge and spokesperson Hilmar Schepp, for instance, did a complete podcast with the German IT publishing company Heise Online (German only). A similar format was delivered together with the German society “Wege aus der Einsamkeit e.V.” that wants to improve the living conditions of the elderly and their position in society. Sebastian Wolf gave an interview (German only) about his insights in the design and development phase of the app. 

List of SAP-related Open Source Publications 

 

On our SAP Community Wiki we maintain a full list of presentations, blog posts, journal articles, and publications related to SAP Open Source for your reference. 

 

“Family and friends are hidden treasures, seek them out and enjoy their riches.” 

 

We would like to end this open source year in review with a big THANK YOU to all open source contributors and supporters. We are very much looking forward to the continued collaboration with you in 2021, as well as to our joint projects and partnerships. We wish you and your loved ones a healthy and successful year 2021.