7. SAP

SAP means Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung. This is german for System analysis and program development. The name was later changed into Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung: Systems, application and products in the data processing.

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 SAP idea was to provide customers with the ability to interact with a common corporate database for a comprehensive range of applications. Gradually, the applications have been assembled and today many corporations, including IBM and Microsoft, are using SAP products to run their own businesses.

The first version of Sap’s enterprise software was a financial Accounting system named R/1. (The "R" was for "Real-time data processing"). This was replaced by R/2 at the end of the 1970s. SAP R/2 was a mainframe based business application software suite that was very successful in the 1980s and early 1990s. With the advent of distributed client server computing SAP AG brought out a client-server version of the software called SAP R/3 that was manageable on multiple platforms and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows or UNIX since 1999, which opened up SAP to a whole new customer base. SAP R/3 was officially launched on 6 July 1992. SAP came to dominate the large business applications market over the next 10 years.

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 client/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).