SAP Overview
What is SAP? SAP (Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing), is headquartered in Walldorf, Germany. They provide business software designed to help companies execute and optimize business and IT strategies. SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning (ERP) and related applications such as supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), product life‐cycle management, and supplier relationship management (SRM).1
SAP currently has:
• More than 51,000 employees in over 50 countries developing, marketing, and selling applications and services • 82,000 customers of all sizes across 25 industries and in over 120 countries • Listings on the Frankfurt and New York stock exchanges
SAP operates in three geographic regions: EMEA (representing Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Americas, and Asia Pacific Japan (APJ, representing Japan, Australia, and parts of Asia). 2
History of SAP In 1972, SAP was founded by 5 former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany with the vision to “to develop standard application software for real‐time business processing.” After the first year, they created the first financial accounting software application, which came to be known as the "R/1 system." "R" stands for real‐time data processing. By the end of the 1970s, R/1 evolved into SAP R/2. The programming language ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) was also a derivative of R/2, originally serving as the report language for the system.3
In the 1980s, SAP R/2 was updated to handle different languages and currencies‐‐subsequently, this lead to SAP’s international expansion into Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and the United States.
By the 1990s, SAP R/3 was introduced to the market. ABAP was an important foundation of the system as it was used to develop the R/3 platform. The client‐server concept, uniform appearance of graphical interfaces, consistent use of relational databases, and the ability to run on computers from different vendors becomes increasingly popular.
ABAP continues to serve as a development foundation for SAP, allowing customers to create custom reports and interfaces for their own systems. NetWeaver, introduced in 2004 by SAP, is their most recent development platform. It supports both ABAP and Java.4
1 SAP, http://www.linkedin.com/companies/sap (June 2009) 2 About SAP, http://sapsustainabilityreport.com/aboutSAP.html (June 2009) 3 SAP FANS, http://www.sapfans.com/?page_id=3 4 SAP, https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw‐2004 Currently, SAP’s client base reaches out to more than 12 million users each day. SAP is now also the world's third‐largest independent software vendor.5
Latest Products SAP provides a range of business software and enterprise applications to empower every aspect of the business.
SAP Business Suite software provides “best industry practices” with industry specific applications, as well as the core applications of the SAP Business Suite:
• SAP Customer Relationship Management • SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) • SAP Product Lifecycle Management • SAP Supply Chain Management • SAP Supplier Relationship Management6
In addition to their Business Suite software, they provide a variety of solutions, including SAP BusinessObjects – a business intelligence platform, SAP Manufacturing, and SAP Service and Asset Management solution, which supports service management, service parts management, and enterprise asset management.
Future of SAP SAP is focusing on the following growth goals through 2010:
• Double the size of the addressable market for business software and services to $75 billion • Increase customer base to 100,000 • Derive 50 percent of revenue from new products by 2010
They are committed to growing organically, innovating with partners and acquiring companies that add specific technologies and capabilities to SAP’s software solution offerings.7
5 History of SAP, http://www.sapfans.com/sapfans/saphist.htm (June 2009) 6 SAP Business Suite, http://www.sap.com/solutions/business‐suite/index.epx (June2009) 7 About SAP, http://sapsustainabilityreport.com/aboutSAP.html (June 2009)