The old guard of the enterprise software industry has been charichastically slow to recognize the potential of OpenStack as a means of countering Amazon’s advance on its home turf, but it eventually adapted, at least to some extent, to the new reality of open cloud computing. That is, with the notable exception of SAP, which has shied away from becoming  actively involved in that space even as the competition leapfrogged ahead.

IBM, one of the business intelligence giant’s biggest rivals, has a long track record of investing in open-source technology and counts itself among the founding members of the OpenStack Foundation, the body responsible for promoting the adoption and continuous improvement of the platform. Even Oracle, SAP’s other top competitor and a vendor known for its staunchly proprietary product strategy,  joined the consortium  last December after apparently recognizing that there’s simply no sidelining open-source software anymore.

SAP, however, remained dormant on that front even as it pressed ahead with plans to migrate much of its portfolio to the public cloud. But signs slowly emerged that wouldn’t remain the case for very long. Last June, the company’s venture capital arm contributed to a $10 million investment in Mirantis, an OpenStack distributor that recently allied with Oracle. And a few short months later, SAP led a $40 million round in Virtustream, a service provider that was at the time in the process of migrating its environment to the open cloud platform.

That series of events culminated in this week’s announcement that the German software powerhouse has become a sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation.  SAP, which claims to leverage the platform in its cloud environment, stated that it intends to turn into “active consumer” and contribute code with the goal of addressing barriers to adoption for traditional enterpises.

In conjunction, the company revealed that it has become a  sponsor of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a newly established consortium in charge of guiding how the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) evolves. The organization had already listed IBM among its members but not Oracle, which is busy pushing its own middleware stack.

SAP is joining as a “Platinum” member, but didn’t explicitly say if it intends to get actively involved in the development the project. In light of that, it’s worth noting the firm has already contributed code to Cloud Foundry in the form of an open-source service broker for its flagship HANA in-memory analytic database that was released to GitHub last December, back when the PaaS still belonged to the EMC federation’s Pivotal.

The move indicates that both OpenStack and Cloud Foundry will take on a more active role in SAP’s cloud strategy as it makes more and more of its on-premise software portfolio available for consumption in service form. Whether that new open-source focus is merely a “me-too” move meant to reassure customers and developers that it’s not falling behind the curve or the opening gambit in a broader push – perhaps towards hybrid computing, a shared priority of the projects  – still remains to be seen.

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