What is SAP?

SAP, started in 1972 by five former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany, states that it is the world's largest inter-enterprise software company and the world's fourth-largest independent software supplier, overall. The original name for SAP was German: Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte, German for "Systems Applications and Products in data processing". The original SAP idea was to provide customers with the ability to interact with a common corporate database for a comprehensive range of applications.

SAP is the third largest software company in the world.
SAP is the largest business application and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution software provider in terms of revenue.

SAP's products focus on ERP, which it helped to pioneer. The company's main product is MySAP ERP. The name of its predecessor, SAP R/3 give a clue to its functionality: the "R" stands for realtime data processing and the number 3 relates to a 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client (SAPgui). R/2, which ran on a Mainframe architecture, was the first SAP version.

Other major product offerings include
Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO),
Business Information Warehouse (BW),
Customer Relationship Management (CRM),
Supply Chain Management (SCM),
Supplier Relationship Management (SRM),
Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS),
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM),
Exchange Infrastructure (XI),
Enterprise Portal (EP) and
Knowledge Warehouse (KW).

The APO name has been retired and rolled into SCM. The BW name (Business Warehouse) has now been rolled into the SAP NetWeaver BI (Business Intelligence) suite and functions as the reporting module.

SAP applications, built around their latest R/3 system, provide the capability to manage financial, asset, and cost accounting, production operations and materials, personnel, plants, and archived documents. The R/3 system runs on a number of platforms including Windows 2000 and uses the clientt/server model. The latest version of R/3 includes a comprehensive Internet-enabled package.

SAP has recently recast its product offerings under a comprehensive Web interface, called mySAP.com, and added new e-business applications, including customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM).