What is SAP?

What is SAP?

Integrated application known as "Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing"

SAP is the leader in the market of enterprise applications in terms of software and software-related service.

The company's best-known software products are its enterprise resource planning application systems and management (SAP ERP), its enterprise data warehouse product – SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP BusinessObjects software, and most recently, Sybase mobile products and in-memory computing appliance SAP HANA. SAP is one of the largest software companies in the world.

SAP's products focus on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and also SAP focuses on six industry sectors: process industries, discrete industries, consumer industries, service industries, financial services, and public services. It offers integrated product sets for large enterprises and midsize companies and small businesses.

Foundation / History

When Xerox decided to exit the computer industry, they asked IBM to migrate their business systems to IBM technology. As part of IBM's compensation for the migration, IBM was given the rights to the SDS/SAPE software, reportedly for a contract credit of $80,000.

Five IBM engineers from the AI departament (Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, and Claus Wellenreuther, all from Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg) were working in an enterprise-wide system based in this software, only to be told that it would be no longer necessary. Rather than abandon the project, they decided to leave IBM and start another company. They had 8% in IBM founding. In exchange for this stock, they got the rights to the SAPE software as part of the deal.^{[citation needed]}.

In June 1972 they founded Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung ("System Analysis and Program Development") as a private partnership under the German Civil Code. The acronym was later changed to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung ("Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing").

Their first client was the German branch of Imperial Chemical Industries in Östringen, where they developed mainframe programs for payroll and accounting. Instead of storing the data on punch cards mechanically, as IBM did, they stored it locally. Therefore, they called their software a real-time system, since there was no need to process the punch cards overnight (for this reason their flagship product carried a R in its name until the late 1990s). This first version was also a standalone software, that could be offered to other interested parties.