With its large portfolio of proprietary applications, SAP is a software company few folks would associate with open source. SAP Sybase CTO Ifran Khan would like to change that perception, however. Khan took the stage at the Red Hat Summitin Boston today, detailing SAP’s take on Linux, open source and Big Data.
Khan began his keynote with a staggering statistic. He noted that 65 percent of the world’s GDP will touch an SAP back-end system at some point. Like other long-established companies with large portfolios of on-premise software, SAP is now moving its applications to mobile and cloud environments. The key, Khan stressed, is doing so in a way as non-disruptive as possible for customers.