What is SAP?

SAP, started in 1972 by five former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany, states that it is the world's third-largest independent software vendor. The original name for SAP was German: Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte. It means "Systems Applications and Products." The goal of the company was to provide large enterprise customers with the ability to interact with a corporate database in real-time. Today, the company states that its goal is "to offer the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of business performance and optimization solutions for companies of all sizes.

SAP's first software application was a financial accounting software suite that ran on a mainframe and was known for its stability. It eventually became known as the R/1 system. The "R" stands for real-time. During the 1980s, the company went international, and the second iteration of the R system (R/2) accommodated different languages and currencies. In the 1990s, the third iteration (R/3) moved from the mainframe to a client/server three-tier architecture composed of a database, software applications and a common graphical user interface (GUI). SAP used the name R/3 until the 5.0 release. At that time the name was changed from R/version to ERP Central Component (ECC). The most current version as of November 2009 is ECC 6.0.

When the Internet became pervasive, SAP responded by providing companies with the software they needed to sell goods and services online. Their product portfolio got a Web interface and was rebranded MySAP.com. MySAP was designed to be a corporate Web portal with role-based permissions for employees . The company promoted how SAP "solutions" could link commerce conducted over the Internet (e-commerce) with traditional bricks and mortar commerce to provide one seamless view of the business. Next came SAP NetWeaver, the company’s development and integration platform and middleware component, and Business Suite, a bundling of SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), product lifecycle management (PLM) and supplier relationship management (SRM) applications. In 2008, SAP purchased Business Objects, a French enterprise software company that specializes in business intelligence (BI), which marked a major change in the company’s BI strategy, which was previously focused around SAP's Business Explorer tools.