SAP (company) - Definition and Overview

Corporate logo of SAP

SAP is the name of the biggest European software company. The head office is in Walldorf, Germany.

Company

SAP is an acronym for "Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung", which means "Systems - Applications - Products in data processing". The company was founded in 1972 by the former IBM employees Claus Wellenreuther, Hans-Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira, Dietmar Hopp and Hasso Plattner. In 2004, Microsoft had preliminary discussions about merging with SAP, those talks did not advance.

Products

SAPs products are in the Enterprise resource planning ERP business sector. The company's main product is SAP R/3, where the "R" stands for Realtime, the number 3 relates to the three tier application architecture: database, application server and client. The predecessor to R/3 was R/2. Other major offerings include APO (Advanced Planner and Optimizer), BW (Business Information Warehouse), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SRM (Supplier Relationship Management), Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) and KW (Knowledge Warehouse). The company also offers a new technology platform, named SAP NetWeaver. While its original products are mostly used by larger companies, SAP is now also offering products for small and medium sized enterprises (SME) with SAP Business One and SAP All In One.

External links

• Official site (http://www.sap.com)
  • The SAP Service Marketplace is SAP's platform for customers and partners and offers target-group specific content in various portals (http://service.sap.com)
  • The SAP Help Portal provides you with web-based documentation for all SAP solutions (http://help.sap.com)
  • The SAP Developer Network (http://sdn.sap.com)
  • Jobs at SAP (http://www.sap.com/company/jobs/)
  • SAP's resource & forum for people-centric design (http://www.sapdesignguild.org)

Users

• Americas' SAP Users' Group (http://www.asug.com)

Data

• Yahoo! - SAP Aktiengesellschaft Company Profile (http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/91/91277.html)