SAP Overview
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.
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