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SAP Overview

What is SAP?

SAP (Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing), is headquartered in Walldorf, Germany. They provid

e business software designed to help companies execute and optimize business and IT strategies. SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning (ERP) and related applications such as supply chainmanagement (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management, and supplier relationship management (SRM).1

SAP currently has:

1More than 51,000 employees in over 50 countries developing, marketing, and selling applications and services82,000 customers of all sizes across 25 industries and in over 120 countriesListings on the Frankfurt and New York stock exchangesSAP operates in three geographic regions: EMEA (representing Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Americas, and Asia Pacific Japan (APJ, representing Japan, Australia, and parts of Asia). 2

History of SAP

In 1972, SAP was founded by 5 former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany with the vision to to develop standard application software for realtime business processing. After the first year, they created the first financi

al accounting software application, which came to be known as the "R/1 system." "R" stands for realtime data processing. By the end of the 1970s, R/1 evolved into SAP R/2. The programming language ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) was also a derivative of R/2, originally serving as the report language for thesystem.3

In the 1980s, SAP R/2 was updated to handle different languages and currencies

subsequently, this lead to SAPs international expansion into Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and the United States.

By the 1990s, SAP R/3 was introduced to the market. ABAP was an important foundation of the system as it was used to develop the R/3 platform. The clientserver concept, uniform appearance of graphical interfaces, consistent use of relational databases, and the ability to run on computers from different vendors becomes increasingly popular.

ABAP continues to serve as a development foundation for SAP, allowing customers to create custom reports and interfaces for their own systems. NetWeaver, introduced in 200

4 by SAP, is their most recent development platform. It supports both ABAP and Java.4

1 SAP, http://www.linkedin.com/companies/sap(June 2009)2 About SAP,http://sapsustainabilityreport.com/aboutSAP.html (June 2009)3 SAP FANS, http://www.sapfans.com/?page_id=34 SAP, https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw2004

5 History of SAP,http://www.sapfans.com/sapfans/saphist.htm(June 2009)6 SAP Business Suite, http://www.sap.com/solutions/businesssuite/index.epx (June2009)

7 About SAP,http://sapsustainabilityreport.com/aboutSAP.html (June 2009)

Currently, SAPs client base reaches out to more than 12 million users each day. SAP is now also the world's thirdlargest independent software vendor.5

Latest Products

SAP provides a range of business software and enterprise applications to empower every aspect of thebusiness.

SAP Business Suite software provides best industry practices with industry specific applications, as

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well as the core applications of the SAP Business Suite:

1SAP Customer Relationship ManagementSAP ERP (enterprise resource planning)

SAP Product Lifecycle ManagementSAP Supply Chain ManagementSAP Supplier Relationship Management6

In addition to their Business Suite software, they provide a variety of solutions, including SAP BusinessObjects a business intelligence platform, SAP Manufacturing, and SAP Service and Asset Management solution, which supports service management, service parts management, and enterprise asset management.

Future of SAP

SAP is focusing on the following growth goals through 2010:1Double the size of the addressable market for business software and services to $75 billionIncrease customer base to 100,000Derive 50 percent of revenue from new products by 2010

They are committed to growing organically, innovating with partners and acquiring companies that add specific technologies and capabilities to SAPs software solution offerings.7