SAP Extends Commitment to Open Source

June 8 2009

As part of its ongoing commitment to Java technology and the choice it provides to customers as well as industry-wide technology standards and open source, SAPis taking a more active leadership role in the Eclipse Foundation by increasing its membership level from Strategic Consumer to Strategic Developer. SAP will provide at least eight full-time development resources to various projects and lead open source projects, ensuring direct input into the development and architecture of Eclipse. As a Strategic Developer, SAP will be more active within the Eclipse community, including the new Eclipse Git Team Provider (EGit), the Eclipse Modeling Project (EMP) and the Eclipse Equinox Project. Eclipse technology has become the de-facto standard in many domains and for many companies ongoing collaboration on various projects with other industry leaders supports the standards and open source strategies of customers and partners.

The use of standard technologies developed within the Eclipse community provides customers and partners with a familiar development environment and, as a result, the steep learning curve for resources is eliminated. SAP supports the mission of the Eclipse Foundation to help increase developer adoption of Eclipse technologies in the software industry, as well as the broad support by a large number of software vendors, has increased interoperability between solutions based on the same common Eclipse technologies.

SAP is a founding member of the foundation and has been using Eclipse technology since 2002. As an active contributor to the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project (WTP) and an original contributor of the Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool (see “SAP Contributes New Tool to Open Source Eclipse Developer Community”), SAP has been involved in the Eclipse ecosystem since 2004. Through its expanded involvement, SAP will collaborate with other members on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. The Eclipse Git Team Provider (EGit) project was co-initiated by SAP to drive the evolution of a modern distributed version control system boosting development productivity with easier Eclipse integration and higher performance at reduced total cost of ownership. Participation in the Eclipse Modeling Project (EMP) will drive the evolution and promotion of model-based development technologies, and the Eclipse Equinox Project will provide a service-oriented OSGi-based modular platform for application development and operations. Additionally, SAP has proposed a new project, codename Pave, within WTP, with initial code donation from SAP that will provide a template-based application framework to simplify development of complex applications.