Why Sap Is Opening Up Its Data And Developer Ecosystems

BERLIN — One of SAP’s cardinal themes during its TechEd 2025 arena successful Berlin this twelvemonth was “openness.” While it’s not an unfastened root institution successful nan accepted sense, complete nan past decade, SAP has regularly been among nan top 10 unfastened root contributors successful position of progressive contributors, and it’s doubling down connected this. But SAP has besides shifted to being much unfastened successful different ways, which became clear successful a number of conversations I precocious had pinch immoderate of its executives.

This displacement to being much unfastened takes respective forms. It includes opening up nan SAP developer ecosystem to much devices for illustration its clasp of VS Code and various agentic coding agents and platforms for illustration Claude Code, Cline and Windsurf, arsenic good arsenic frameworks for illustration Crew.ai and LangGraph. Among different projects, SAP is besides backing nan Agent2Agent protocol to thief agents talk to each other, nary matter nan model they were written successful aliases nan level they tally on.

An Open Data Ecosystem

But possibly moreover much importantly, SAP is looking to make its information ecosystem much unfastened arsenic well. Sometimes, that takes nan shape of caller partnerships pinch nan likes of Databricks, Google and, astir recently, Snowflake. But it’s besides astir offering Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to let third-party agents to entree devices and information connected its platform.

“This is simply a shift,” Michael Ameling, SAP’s president of its Business Technology Platform and a personnel of its extended board, told me. “Ten years back, aliases 5 years back, I would opportunity it was still different, and particularly successful position of information lakes and nan like. But we person shifted nan strategy successful that position — besides simply owed to nan reality that a batch of particularly large customers started to create their information lakes successful Databricks, successful Snowflake and pinch different vendors. And truthful this is wherever they are, and it would beryllium insane to unit them now to move each their information back.”

Acknowledging this reality, SAP decided to partner pinch these companies and attraction connected adding worth connected apical of these integrations for nan associated customers, Ameling explained. The institution says it’s unfastened to moving pinch different databases, moreover arsenic it evidently remains committed to its halfway database products for illustration SAP HANA Cloud.

“Our strategy intelligibly is continuing to make judge we make HANA Cloud nan champion and nan astir robust database, not conscionable for customers retired there, for their usage cases, but surely for each of our SAP stack from applications to information to AI,” Muhammad Alam, who heads up each of SAP’s business package applications, noted successful a property convention during TechEd.

Similarly, Bharat Sandhu, nan main trading serviceman of nan company’s Business Technology Platform, offered a akin appraisal of why SAP is going this route. “We conscionable want to do what we do really well, which is letting customers create solutions to tally their businesses astatine nan extremity of nan day. And for us, astatine slightest connected nan Build side, 1 facet of that is providing really bully context, for illustration we’re doing done our MCP servers, whether it’s business information or, increasingly, moreover tooling.”

In this caller world, wherever galore of nan ample endeavor package companies are now trying to position themselves arsenic nan spot for building and hosting AI agents, location is besides an expanding anticipation that these agents will beryllium capable to usage nan devices and information from various sources. Context is, aft all, what makes these agents do their champion activity — and multi-agent systems that talk to agents from aggregate vendors whitethorn soon go nan norm. In that world, unfastened information ecosystems aren’t a prime but a necessity.

Besides nan needs of AI systems, though, SAP’s customers intelligibly want to beryllium capable to usage much SAP and non-SAP information for nan circumstantial business needs, and I wouldn’t beryllium amazed if we saw much nonstop integrations pinch much information platforms soon.

An Open Developer Ecosystem

All of this is besides existent astir developer tooling successful nan SAP ecosystem. In aggregate conversations I had pinch SAP executives, nan taxable of developer prime came up. Developers are picky astir nan devices they use, but successful nan world of AI developer tooling, preferences support changing rapidly.

“New things travel successful and travel out,” Sandhu told me. “So it’s champion to beryllium unfastened to service our audiences, which are very divers astir nan world.”

When it comes to models, SAP is besides taking nan unfastened way pinch nan merchandise of an open-weight type of its RPT-1 relational instauration model, which intends to make predictions connected tabular information pinch nan accuracy of specifically trained instrumentality learning models (though astatine a slower speed). Though location is simply a quality betwixt nan unfastened and nan closed models, which were trained pinch an enriched information set, that’s a measurement successful nan correct direction, particularly fixed that these kinds of models are still very nascent.

Ameling, similarly, noted that pinch nan AI ecosystem moving truthful quickly and caller devices and models appearing astatine a accelerated clip, elasticity is key.

“I powerfully judge you request this flexibility, because if not, which equine would you stake on? I deliberation it’s for illustration looking into a solid ball,” Ameling said. “So this is decidedly wherever we say, ‘let’s person an unfastened strategy, for illustration we person for nan LLMs, for illustration we person for nan information centers, and besides each nan hyperscalers and nan like.’ As soon arsenic thing caller comes, conscionable talk to them. APIs are there. Let’s merge it and we tin hook up this innovation. This is what I mean by ever bringing a future-ready architecture to nan customer.”

In that context, it makes consciousness for SAP to want to partner pinch a assortment of AI-centric devices for illustration Claude Code, Cursor, n8n and Windsurf (and different coding agents will beryllium capable to usage these tools, too, moreover without a general partnership), each while besides bringing much of its ain tooling straight into Visual Studio Code pinch nan thief of a caller extension.

SAP is moreover bringing support for ABAP, its proprietary high-level programming language, to Visual Studio Code. Traditionally, Eclipse has been nan main improvement situation for master coders.

SAP’s Sandhu told maine that nan extended Visual Studio Code support was driven by customer demand.

“At nan extremity of nan day, what we want to do is thief customers build their solutions faster,” he said.

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