From the 'who isn't open?' files:

When I was at Interop in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I heard SAP CTO Vishal Sikka (pic left that I took) explain how SAP supports Open Source for the cloud.

Today ,SAP extended its open source commitment by upping its membership status within the Eclipse Foundation. SAP is now a Strategic Developer (up from being a Strategic Consumer).  With the new membership level, SAP is set to provide at least eight full-time development resources as well help lead an open source project within Eclipse.

Basically it means that SAP will become more active in open source development at Eclipse. SAP has actually also proposed a new Eclipse project codename Pave, that will be a template-based application framework for complex application development.

SAP is no stranger to Eclipse and is in fact a founding member of the foundation and uses Eclipse as the basis of its NetWeaver technology.

Moving from consumer to developer is key in my view because it is a different level of participation. It means that SAP will contribute more resources - which could ultimately benefit SAP as well as the broader based of Eclipse users.