From programming languages and frameworks, to components with bridge functionality, “there is so much innovation happening,” according to Sanjay Patil, senior director of industry standards and open source at SAP, who spoke with The New Stack’s Alex Williams and co-host Donnie Berkholz of 451 Research for this 76th edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

Dynamics in the market have led to continually changing business requirements, said Patil. “There is this mix of need for continuous innovation, and a lot of choices available at the same time.” In this ever-changing mix, enterprises want to tap into the potential of these new technologies with a platform “that supports leveraging all these innovations in a more meaningful, somewhat predictable manner,” he said.

SAP saw the need for “a platform for continuous innovation that would include continuous development, deployment, maintenance,” said Patil. Consequently, SAP has been building SAP Hana Cloud Platform (HCP), “a platform for application as a service.”

“And that is squarely where we see Cloud Foundry as the underlying technology,” he said. “In short, Cloud Foundry provides the technical underpinning of SAP’s platform as a service offering.”

Stormy Peters, VP of technical evangelism at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, also participated on the podcast panel.

Among the Foundation’s more than 50 member companies are “a whole lot of user companies” that have to move their applications to the cloud, said Peters. Such a company “is looking for a platform that gives it not only all the tools it needs, but also the portability to not feel locked-in, to be able to move from one vendor to the other, so that they can move to the one that’s best for them,” she said.