How SAP uses GitHub

Company Overview

Industry: Business Software
Company Size: 96,400 employees
Location: Walldorf, Germany
GitHub Organizations: 6,000+
Repositories: 155,000+

SAP is one of the world's largest providers of business software. The company has become integral to how businesses operate—77% of all transaction revenue touches one of their systems. SAP serves 25 different industries, from retail and financial services to agriculture and human resources.

The Challenge

SAP needed to modernize and streamline software development across a large, global engineering organization. As clients expected more from software—expanded uptime, features, and support—SAP solutions needed to keep pace without compromising speed or security.

The Solution

GitHub Enterprise helped SAP bring teams together on one platform, making it easier to share code, collaborate, and deliver software faster.

The adoption of GitHub at SAP began organically six years ago when a smaller engineering group asked to use the platform for a project focused on building out SAP's infrastructure-as-a-service initiative. The team chose GitHub because they were already familiar with it from open source contributions and personal projects, and they saw it as a natural fit for collaborative workflows. When developers on other teams noticed the productivity improvements, adoption spread.

As GitHub use grew across the organization, SAP Cloud Development Tools Manager Ingo Sauerzapf recognized the opportunity to formalize the platform. "It's hard to buy software as a company of our size," he recalled. "We loved that teams got there before us, but we felt we could do even more with GitHub. Then we took the adoption under our wing, moved it forward, and made it a standard tool at SAP."

Scale and Adoption

SAP now has more than 35,000 developers across 6,000 GitHub organizations, maintaining at least 155,000 repositories that serve as a centralized place for finding code, sharing documentation, and launching new ideas.

Eighty-one percent of SAP's GitHub users are software developers, while others include data scientists, product owners, and designers. A full 95% use GitHub frequently to submit code, update issues, and inspect dashboards. GitHub ranks at the top of the company's software tools satisfaction list and comes highly recommended across the organization.

Hiring and Talent

Sauerzapf leverages GitHub as a hiring tool. Young developers know GitHub from school and want to work for companies where they can apply that knowledge. Potential candidates also browse SAP's GitHub profile to see what they'll work on and to find companies that embrace open source.

Innersourcing and Collaboration

As developers work on one platform, years of their best ideas, teachable moments, and the conversations behind them all make it to GitHub. To take advantage of the growing software community within SAP, developers are encouraged to innersource work, opening up projects to feedback and ideas from the rest of the organization.

"You can freely create as many repositories as you like and start a project," Sauerzapf explained. "If somebody runs a satellite tool they want to connect, they can use any APIs they need. The system intentionally has the same openness that GitHub has, with exactly that same approach internally: if they have an idea, people can open a repository and just get started."

Open Source and Cloud Transformation

As SAP undergoes a "cloud transformation," GitHub has become a way for the team to bridge the gap between open and closed source projects. With more lines of code shifting from their servers to the public cloud, SAP can build alongside the open source community, integrate leading open source technologies into their own solutions, and contribute code to the projects they use most.

"We've had an open source mindset from day one," said Sauerzapf. In the last five years, the results have become clear. 2017 marked the company's first year as one of the top ten contributors to open source. More recently, they set up an open source program office. "This hasn't been done in the past, but now many of our projects start as open source code on GitHub.com, unless they're our IP. The benefits of engaging the community are clear: like fast fixes and new ideas in a collaborative environment."

The shift to open source—and to technologies like Ansible, Jenkins, and others—has helped define a new way of working for SAP. Their new DevOps model values efficiency over infrastructure maintenance and best-in-breed integrations over custom tooling.

DevOps and Deployment Speed

Moving development operations to the cloud has allowed SAP to speed up deployments and expand their offerings. Previously, code was compiled, packaged with an installer, and downloaded or shipped on physical media. Now, Sauerzapf's team can work across time zones on the same source code, shipping and supporting software nearly 24/7.

"All of the sudden, with tools like Terraform, Packer, Ansible, and Chef, we're in the production line a lot more than we used to be," Sauerzapf noted. "Teams come to us with pressing customer requests—sometimes with turnaround times of just a few hours."

Support and Reliability

With integrations serving thousands of developers, success is tied directly to the reliability of SAP's toolchain. Sauerzapf emphasized the value of on-demand support and service-level agreements (SLAs). "With our big push to the public cloud comes the automation of infrastructure and the required tooling. All of these tools store their code on GitHub, making the platform the source for everything."

GitHub Premium Support ensures that Sauerzapf's team is successful, no matter when they work. Sauerzapf also stressed the value of having a dedicated service account engineer—someone deeply familiar not just with GitHub as a product, but with SAP's instance in particular, to help manage and fine-tune it.

"Sometimes there are things that need to be done inside GitHub that may be very minor, but they make or break SAP and the experience of the developers in it. That's where the service account engineer is important. With GitHub, you're not only investing in software. You're also investing in an ecosystem of support. And the value is clear."

Looking Forward

With reliable tools that fit their needs, SAP has created a flexible infrastructure that grows with the team, incorporates open source code, and builds on best practices from the open source community. "This collaborative way of building software is unstoppable. It isn't going away—and GitHub has its place in that," said Sauerzapf. "We can make the whole company rethink how they build software."