Red Hat, IBM and SAP: Collaborating on bridging the intelligent enterprise with a cloud-native future

At Red Hat, we believe that the open hybrid cloud is the future. Realizing the opportunity it offers rests on balancing data strategies, business models, and using the latest innovation. We find that as companies continue to rapidly evolve business models and re-architect processes to better support clients, suppliers and the workforce, many are realizing that public cloud offerings cannot fully meet their changing needs. The result is an increased interest in intelligent enterprises based on private and open hybrid cloud offerings. Frequently, we see business intelligence being driven by managed services, like SAP Cloud Platform, which makes the ability to use these services on-premises a key need for many organizations. 

Red Hat has always valued collaboration in supporting “what’s next” for enterprises, whether it’s cloud-native infrastructure or business-class intelligence solutions. This collaboration can be seen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP solutions, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform which has been optimized for SAP environments, and can run across a broad set of hardware architectures including IBM POWER.

We want to meet our customers’ needs for IT innovation wherever they are, from corporate datacenters to the public cloud and everywhere in between. To further this mission, we’re collaborating with SAP and IBM on a joint initiative to bring SAP’s managed services on-premises by validating private deployments of SAP Cloud Platform and related backing services on Red Hat OpenShift. Currently with select early adopter clients, this solution, when available, is planned to provide additional flexibility and choice to how enterprises can gain new insights into their operations, find new revenue streams or simply maintain operations in dynamic conditions. 

As part of this project, SAP is planning to adapt the SAP Cloud Platform public offering so it can run from a customer’s location, using the customer’s datacenter resources to address specific needs for security, control, speed, agility and end-to-end development. By combining SAP Cloud Platform capabilities with Red Hat’s open source technologies, this solution, when available, will help customers innovate and become digitally enabled, while still running more securely behind the firewall in their own datacenters.

Driving modernization through virtualization

A key enabler of SAP cloud native services running on-premise is the use of container technology and Kubernetes. The integration of SAP’s open source project “Gardener” and Red Hat OpenShift’s new virtualization capabilities are crucial components to allow smooth and scalable on-premise deployments. Through OpenShift virtualization, customers can host SAP's managed services on a more secure, dedicated virtual infrastructure. At the same time, they can use OpenShift’s identity management and service discovery to drive cleaner integration with existing systems. For operations teams, managed services become just another OpenShift workload that can be implemented, maintained, resource managed and monitored consistently through familiar Kubernetes primitives and tooling. 

Built on the KubeVirt community project, OpenShift virtualization offers a more consistent development experience across VMs, containers and serverless functions. For SAP Cloud Platform containerization through SAP’s open source project “Gardener” and  future on-premise deployments, OpenShift virtualization acts as a plugin to enable virtual infrastructure and support for services beyond public cloud environments in a customer’s own datacenter. 

What’s next

Together with IBM and SAP, Red Hat aims to continue to open new doors for customers and jointly drive a common approach to hyperscale Kubernetes cluster management. This community-oriented collaboration looks to tap into trends such as virtualization and Kubernetes as a means to modernize IT landscapes for customers, thereby supporting their journey to become an intelligent enterprise.

For further information about the availability of private deployments of SAP Cloud Platform on Red Hat OpenShift, please refer to the SAP Cloud Platform home page.