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SAP is the third-largest software company in the world. It ranks after Microsoft and Oracle in terms of market capitalization. SAP is the largest business application and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution software provider in terms of revenue.
SAP AG is also the largest European software enterprise, with headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. SAP was founded in 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung by five former IBM engineers in Mannheim, Germany. The name (but not the acronym) was later changed to Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung (in English Systems, Applications And Products in Data Processing) and since the 2005 annual general meeting the company's official name is just SAP AG.
In 1973 the SAP R/1 solution was launched. Six years later, in 1979, SAP launched SAP R/2. In 1981, SAP brought a completely re-designed solution to market. With the change from R/2 to R/3 in 1992, SAP followed the trend from mainframe computing to client-server architectures. The development of SAP’s internet strategy with mySAP.com redesigned the concept of business processes (integration via Internet). SAP was awarded Industry Week’s Best Managed Companies in 1999.
Reportedly, there are over 100,800 SAP installations at more than 28,000 companies. SAP products are used by over 12 million people in more than 120 countries.
SAP's products focus on ERP, which it helped to pioneer. The company's main product is SAP R/3; the "R" stands for realtime data processing and the number 3 relates to a 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client (SAPgui). SAP R/3's predecessor was R/2 which ran on a Mainframe architecture. |
