In this episode of The Open Source Way, Karsten Hohage chats with Sonja Lienard, Senior Vice President and Head of ABAP Platform at SAP SE. They delve into Sonja’s professional journey, her contributions to ABAP development, and the significant role open source technologies play at SAP.

The discussion covers Sonja’s involvement with various programming languages, the integration of Eclipse IDE and Rust into ABAP development, and the importance of bottom-up innovation. Sonja emphasizes the value of swarm intelligence and the necessity for senior management to grant developers the freedom to explore open source projects.

Tune in for an engaging conversation on how open source drives both external collaboration and internal development at SAP – from a senior manager’s perspective!

Sonja Liénard

Sonja Liénard is Senior Vice President and Head of ABAP Platform at SAP SE. In her role, she leads a global engineering organization and defines the long-term vision, strategy, and roadmap of the ABAP platform in multiple areas such as Generative Artificial Intelligence, ABAP Cloud, ABAP Platform Infrastructure, and Custom Code Transformation for SAP’s Clean Core strategy.

Follow Sonja on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonjalienard/

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

Follow Karsten on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks with our guests Juergen Walter, Pallavi Priyadarshini and Karsten Schnitter about OpenSearch. OpenSearch is an open-source search, analytics and observability suite which has been enhanced with significant AI capabilities. 

This episode showcases SAP’s current use of OpenSearch for observability on their Business Technology Platform and the project’s evolution from Elasticsearch, community-driven development, and AI advancements. Key contributions like FIPS compliance and OpenTelemetry integration are also covered. 

Learn how OpenSearch is shaping the future by combining advanced full-text search, observability, and analytics capabilities—all community-driven and completely open source. 

Pallavi Priyadarshini

As Director of Search, Pallavi Priyadarshini leads Search at the OpenSearch Project and Amazon’s OpenSearch Service, including its managed and serverless offerings. She also serves on the Technical Steering Committee of the OpenSearch Project, helping guide the open-source platform’s technical direction.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pallavipr/ 

Juergen Walter

Jürgen Walter is an observability expert in SAP BTP observability driving ingestion and usage, certifications, and stability topics for SAP Cloud Logging and other services. He is a member of the newly formed OpenSearch Observability TAG and contributed improvements for OpenSearch ingest.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juergen-walter/

Karsten Schnitter

Karsten Schnitter is a software architect working in the observability area of the SAP Business Technology Platform. He is responsible for SAP Cloud Logging and other logging services for SAP BTP. Karsten is also a member of the technical steering committee at the OpenSearch Project.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-schnitter-7b85b174/

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

In this episode, our host Karsten Hohage talks with our guests Juergen Walter, Pallavi Priyadarshini, and Karsten Schnitter about OpenSearch. OpenSearch is an open-source search, analytics and observability suite which has been enhanced with significant AI capabilities.

This episode showcases the current use of OpenSearch within SAP. It also discusses the project history, community development, and the project’s future. OpenSearch is shaping the future by combining advanced full-text search, observability, and analytics capabilities—all community-driven and completely open source.

Juergen Walter

Juergen Walter is an observability expert in SAP BTP observability driving ingestion and usage, certifications, and stability topics for SAP Cloud Logging and other services. He is a member of the newly formed OpenSearch Observability TAG and contributed improvements for OpenSearch ingest.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juergen-walter/

Pallavi Priyadarshini

As Director of Search, Pallavi Priyadarshini leads Search at the OpenSearch Project and Amazon’s OpenSearch Service, including its managed and serverless offerings. She also serves on the Technical Steering Committee of the OpenSearch Project, helping guide the open-source platform’s technical direction.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pallavipr/

Karsten Schnitter

Karsten Schnitter is a software architect working in the observability area of the SAP Business Technology Platform. He is responsible for SAP Cloud Logging and other logging services for SAP BTP. Karsten is also a member of the technical steering committee at the OpenSearch Project.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-schnitter-7b85b174/

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

The post OpenSearch first appeared on The Open Source Way.

In this episode Karsten Hohage, Johannes Ott and Maximilian Techritz talk about Open Managed Control Planes – an open source project that allows you to orchestrate any aspect of a cloud landscape using one declarative API.

Johannes Ott and Maximilian Techritz, who are both software engineers at SAP, talk about Open Managed Control Planes – an open source project that allows you to orchestrate any aspect of a cloud landscape using one declarative API. This is made possible by harmonizing different open source tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Johannes and Maximilian will show why this project solves reoccurring challenges in enterprises, how it works and what organizations need to get started.

Maximilian Techritz

Maximilian Techritz is a Software Engineer and Developer Advocate at SAP. He is one of the contributors to Open Managed Control Planes and shares excitement around tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem to a growing community within SAP and externally.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximilian-techritz 

Johannes Ott

Johannes Ott is a Software Engineer and Developer Advocate at SAP and one of the contributors to Open Managed Control Planes. He actively shares best practices around Infrastructure as Data and promotes tools around the Kubernetes ecosystem within SAP and the open source community.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannes-ott-00a74949/

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

In this episode, Karsten Hohage talks about QEMU with Helge Deller from SAP and Alex Bennée from Linaro. QEMU, short for “Quick Emulator”, is a virtualization software that can be used to emulate various types of hardware. They discuss the open source aspects of QEMU, how it is used in various aspects of the software development lifecycle, and how it helps the software ecosystem.

Helge Deller

Helge is head of SAP’s Linux lab, which is responsible for the development, certification and support of SAP products on Linux. And in his spare time, he is a maintainer of the RISC and PA-RISC Linux port and various areas of the Linux kernel. And he contributes to QEMU.  

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helge-deller

Alex Bennée

Alex is a senior tech lead for virtualization and emulation at Linaro. Over his career, he has worked on devices from one-armed bandits to microwave communication systems.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbennee/

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

In this episode, Karsten Hohage and Siegfried Kiermayer, a cloud architect at SAP Commerce, discuss governance issues and solutions in open source projects.  

The host Karsten Hohage, and guest Siegfried Kiermayer, cloud architect at SAP Commerce, talk about governance issues and solutions in open source projects, using projects like Catena-X and Tractus-X as an example. Starting with the basis of what these projects are, they will go into detail on how the projects are managed with time throughout the episode. 

Siegfried Kiermayer 

For seven years running, Siegfried Kiermayer serves as a Cloud Architect at SAP, where he is currently responsible for the Build Environment of SAP Commerce. He held an integral, founding role with Catena-X for two years and Eclipse Foundation Tractus-X Project Lead. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siegfried-kiermayer-006199110

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

In this episode Karsten Hohage and Thiago Weber Martins, the product manager for AAS Digital Twins at SAP, take a deep dive into the Asset Administration Shell.

The host Karsten Hohage converses with Thiago Weber Martins, the product manager for AAS Digital Twins at SAP, about the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). Thiago takes us on a journey about what the AAS is, what the standards are, and where AAS and digital twins are used. Together they also talk about the original idea and goals of digital twins and how these developed over time.

Thiago Weber Martins

Thiago is a Product Manager for AAS Digital Twins at SAP. His mission is to further develop digital twins based on standards within business applications and processes to ensure interoperability in industrial ecosystems.  

He is therefore involved in the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) to drive the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) as the standard for digital twins. Thiago is also a project lead for the Eclipse AAS Model for Java and member of the Project Management Committee of the Eclipse Digital Twin Top-Level Project.

He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from TU Darmstadt, where he focused on AI approaches to automate product development processes. 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-thiago-weber-martins/

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

A dive into the basics of InnerSource Commmons, the worlds largest community of InnerSource advocates.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Danese Cooper, Guilherme Dellagustin (SAP), and Russ Rutledge about InnerSource Commons. Founded in 2015, InnerSource Commons is the worlds largest community of InnerSource advocates. InnerSource Commons provides knowledge, best pratices, challenges, and solutions related to InnerSource for organizations and individuals.

Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is a well-known advocate for open source. She is also the founder of the InnerSource Commons Foundation. During her career in tech, she has focused on manifesting better software engineering outcomes by fostering healthy community practices and implementing transparent processes. She says that she abhors silos. 

GitHub: https://github.com/danese

Russ Rutledge

Russ Rutledge is the Executive Director of the InnerSource Commons. He also serves as Senior Director of InnerSource and collaboration at WellSky, the health technology company leading the charge to make healthcare better for everyone. And Russ’s drive and passion is to enable all software engineers worldwide to achieve incredible results via streamlined collaborative InnerSource processes.

GitHub: https://github.com/rrrutledge

Guilherme Dellagustin

I am a software developer who acts as InnerSource Officer at SAP. I’m also a member of the InnerSource Commons foundation. As InnerSource officer, I co-lead the InnerSource program at SAP, helping spread the practice in the company, and as member of foundation, I do the same, but to spread the practice in the whole industry. I was also the producer of this very podcast in 2023. In my free time, I talk about retrogaming (in portuguese) at the podcast “Fliperama de Boteco”.

GitHub: https://github.com/dellagustin-sap

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

A little time jump into the past when Christoph Roland and Harald Kuck ported SAP software stack to Linux.

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Christoph Roland (former SAP) and Harald Kuck (SAP) about the past – when they both ported SAP software stack to Linux back in the 90s. Today Linux provides an open-source-based operating system infrastructure for SAP solutions. In the podcast Christoph and Harald share anecdotes and insides from the very beginning of Open Source and SAP.

Christoph Rohland

Chrstoph Rohland discovered Linux at university in early 1993 and was convinced that Linux it had a great future. He joined SAP in 1994 where he started in the support organization, but soon joined Harald’s development team. Christoph took care of SAP’s network library – and ported the SAP stack to Linux. He then founded the SAP LinuxLab. Later he took on several management roles. He left SAP in 2008 to pursue other opportunities.

GitHub: https://github.com/hcrohland

Harald Kuck

Harald Kuck led SAP’s ABAP Platform unit until March 2024 and is now retiring. He started his career at Siemens and Karlsruhe University, before joining SAP in 1989, where he was part of the team implementing the R/3 kernel in C. Since then, Harald has founded several SAP technology development teams, including the SAP JVM team in the Java space or the Steampunk team in the ABAP space. One of the highlights of his 38-year career was initiating SAP’s move to Linux and open source, together with Christoph, in 1999.

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/

What is CAP Operator, what are its main features, and how does it function?

In this episode, host Karsten Hohage speaks with Sathyajith Krishnan (SAP) and Pavan Nayak (SAP) about CAP Operator – which deploys and manages the lifecycle of multi-tenant SAP Cloud Application Programming Model applications and related components, based on SAP BTP golden path, within a Kubernetes cluster.

Sathyajith and Pavan explain the main features of CAP Operator and share an overview of the major automation steps handled by CAP Operator during the deployment of the application. The conversation also covers the operator’s evolution from an internal solution to an open-source resource, the foundational knowledge needed for users, and future enhancements planned for better integration and community engagement.

Sathyajith Krishnan is a Development Architect focused on building platform components which enable ease of consumption as well as access to the latest technologies for developers building business applications. For the past 16 years he has worked as part of product development teams as well as Customer specific implementation projects at SAP which has helped him gain unique perspectives on how to develop platform capabilities for both internal development teams as well as the external ecosystem.

GitHub: https://github.com/skrishnan-sap/

Pavan Nayak is an architect in the Cloud ERP area with 17 years of experience across different projects at SAP. Perhaps this may be of interest to Open Source Way listeners: Pavan was also part of UI5 within SAP and has interest in several Open Source projects in his private life outside SAP, most prominently the custom ROM scene with AOSP (esp. LineageOS).

GitHub: https://github.com/Pavan-SAP

Karsten Hohage – Product Expert in Technology and Innovation (T&I)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karsten-hohage-0180312/