On February 1, 2023, SAP and Red Hat Inc. announced an expanded partnership that will focus on increasing SAP’s use of and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Mentioned in the announcement is that SAP is moving part of their internal IT landscape and their SAP Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Most notably for members of the SAPinsider community, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will now be the preferred operating system for net new business for RISE with SAP deployments. This is a change from what has been the case up to this point.

Red Hat and SAP Collaboration

To understand more about what this announcement means for SAP customers, SAPinsider sat down with Red Hat’s Stefanie Chiras. Chiras is the Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success, and led the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit before moving into that role. Chiras is excited about the announcement not only because of her affiliation with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but because she sees an opportunity to combine the Red Hat and SAP ecosystems to better serve customers of both organizations. “Linux forms the bedrock for the present and the future of SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA deployments,” said Chiras. “Customers running SAP HANA-based systems inherently rely on Linux, and that is where we are excited to bring our capabilities to the table. This deepening of our longstanding partnership with SAP means that customers can now really achieve greater business agility, accelerate their cloud deployments, and drive innovation by building on Red Hat. This agility is very much part of our open hybrid cloud strategy that allows customers to run any application or workload consistently across any footprint. With this expanded collaboration Red Hat Enterprise Linux becomes the standard operating system for SAP for software-as-a-service applications including RISE with SAP deployments.” Chiras emphasized the value of the Red Hat ecosystem in this announcement. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certified on hundreds of clouds and thousands of software vendors,” stated Chiras. “This is the value of an ecosystem. Red Hat has worked with a huge number of partners to make sure that Red Hat Enterprise Linux works in every environment, and that it will work for the long term. We provide consistency so that organizations can focus on what is best for their business going forward.” Part of the increased collaboration will involve Red Hat providing dedicated product engineers and on-site resources to assist SAP’s technical and engineering teams. SAP says that this will allow them to “drive standardization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and interoperability for SAP and Red Hat solutions”. SAP associates will be able to educate themselves about Red Hat technologies through the Red Hat Learning Subscription. Both Red Hat and SAP emphasize that the initiative to extend SAP workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is focused on making it easier for customers to be agile, accelerate cloud deployments, and increase the pace of innovation. This will be achieved using Red Hat’s scalable, flexible, open hybrid cloud architecture. Chiras summarized the benefits of the announcement by saying that “In the past every change was a herculean effort and was incredibly expensive. Today it’s about how you make decisions that allow you to consume change with a lower impact. Standardization of the operating system opens up a world of other choices that you can make later on. It involves a less dramatic shift. It’s less expensive. And it’s easier to consume those changes. It allows you to focus on preparing for change.”

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the two operating systems that can be used with the SAP HANA database. Any organization deploying an application based on SAP HANA will already be familiar with the need to move to a Linux operating system like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Over the course of 2023 there will be increased collaboration between SAP and Red Hat to strengthen the support for RISE with SAP workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as accelerate SAP’s adoption of the operating system. The wording of the press release suggested that this would not necessarily be immediate, but that customers would see an increased depth of collaboration over the course of the year. But how will this impact organizations running or planning to run SAP HANA systems?

• This does not impact existing deployments. SAP has said that “Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be the preferred operating system for net new business for RISE with SAP solution deployments”. If you have already deployed SAP HANA or any aspect of RISE with SAP, nothing will change. And, based on the way that SAP has worded their release, it seems as though customers will still have a choice in the same manner as they choose their cloud service provider and implementation partner. This makes sense as customers who are already running SAP HANA may want new implementations to be on the same operating system they are already running.
• Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be enhanced for all SAP workloads. With Red Hat providing dedicated, on-site resources to work with SAP engineering and technical teams, all SAP workloads will benefit from these resources. The initial switch to having Red Hat Enterprise Linux  as the preferred operating system for RISE with SAP deployments will have an immediate impact, but teams for other SAP solutions will be able to leverage the Red Hat resources to deepen the way that those solutions interact with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• Decisions remain with the customer. There are many potential benefits to SAPinsiders from the announcement. The expanded ecosystem will mean a greater consistency in the way that organizations can move workloads across any environment, no matter where that environment is located. It will also strengthen the way that SAP solutions run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. While these benefits are considerable, SAP has reinforced their “customer choice” message over the last year and that is expected to continue.