SAP SE is dedicated to helping businesses respond to market demands around the clock, according to Steve Lucas, president of Platform Solutions at SAP. Its partnership with Red Hat, Inc. is a key part of its strategy. In an interview with theCUBE at RedHat Summit, Lucas explained further.

“As it turns out, Red Hat, from a platform perspective, [has] pretty much the same mission and purpose, running your business 24/7,” Lucas said. “So those align perfectly, number one. And then number two, you’ve just got … industry upon industry upon industry where Red Hat’s not an option — it’s the option. So certainly for us, from over a decade ago to today, we’ve been driving innovation together with Red Hat, and it’s culminated in some really cool things.”

SAP’s approach to open source

Lucas talked about many of those advances in his keynote earlier in the day and also answered some questions about SAP’s approach to open source.

“We actually are actively contributing to over a hundred different open-source projects … like for example, our new user interface, user experience, we call it UI5; that’s an open-source project,” he said. “So there’s a lot going on at SAP that is open source.”

And that’s not going to change “The best thing for us about Red Hat, SAP and the open-source community, we’re going to keep contributing, keep tight alignment, and make sure that we support everything.”

Comparing it to the Internet and the Cloud, Lucas said open source isn’t going away anytime soon.

“Open source is … it’s a movement. It’s something you can’t ignore … these are dynamics that are shaping the market,” he said. “It’s the same thing as everybody bringing their mobile phone to work. If you’re the CIO that says, ‘Yeah, I don’t care. Everyone has to use a standardized phone,’ you’re not going to be CIO for long. The reality is, from an open-source standpoint, what open source delivers to enterprise organizations is simplicity and scale.”

Simplifying the enterprise landscape

And those are two things that define SAP’s current trajectory.

“That’s really where SAP is focused now … delivering agility, simplicity and scale to customers,” Lucas said. “You could argue that our complete remodel of our own platform business, SAP HANA, all the way to how we work with great vendors like Red Hat and the open-source community, all the way up to the Cloud, all of that is about simplifying the enterprise landscape. Which if we don’t fight against it, it’s just going to get more and more complex.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE