About SAP

SAP is the leading Enterprise Information and Management Package worldwide. Use of this package makes it possible to track and manage, in real-time, sales, production, financial accounts and human resources in an enterprise.

Brief

SAP is developed by five ex-IBM engineers and SAP founded in the year 1972 and important milestones in the company's corporate history include its conversion to a GmbH (a closely-held corporation) in 1977, the opening of the company's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany and its conversion into a publicly-held corporation whose shares are listed on several stock markets, subsequently it is incorporated as SAP AG and There are now over 44,500 installations of SAP, in 120 countries, with more then 10 million users. SAP AG is now the third largest software maker in the world. SAP stands for Systeme, Andwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung which - translated to English - means Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing.

Difference Traditional software Vs SAP

Traditional computer information systems used by many businesses today have been developed to accomplish some specific tasks and provide reports and analysis of events that have already taken place. Examples are accounting general ledger systems. Occasionally, some systems operate in a "real-time" mode that is, have up to date information in them and can be used to actually control events. A typical company has many separate systems to manage different processes like production, sales and accounting. Each of these systems has its own databases and seldom passes information to other systems in a timely manner.

SAP takes a different approach. There is only one information system in an enterprise, SAP. All applications access common data. Real events in the business initiate transactions. Accounting is done automatically by events in sales and production. Sales can see when products can be delivered. Production schedules are driven by sales. The whole system is designed to be real-time and not historical.

SAP structure embodies what are considered the "best business practices". A company implementing SAP adapts it operations to it to achieve its efficiencies and power.

Milestones

So what made this company so successful? Back in 1979 SAP released SAP R/2 (which runs on mainframes) into the German market. SAP R/2 was the first integrated, enterprise wide package and was an immediate success. For years SAP stayed within the German borders until it had penetrated practically every large German company. Looking for more growth, SAP expanded into the remainder of Europe during the 80's. Towards the end of the 80's, client-server architecture became popular and SAP responded with the release of SAP R/3 (in 1992). This turned out to be a killer application for SAP

R/3

It is an enterprise-wide information system designed to coordinate all the resources, information, and activities needed to complete business processes

Evolution

The first version of SAP's flagship enterprise software was a financial Accounting system named R/1. This was replaced by R/2 at the end of the 1970s. SAP R/2 was in a mainframe based business application software suite that was very successful in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was particularly popular with large multinational European companies who required soft-real-time business applications, with multi-currency and multi-language capabilities built in. With the advent of distributed client sever computing SAP AG brought out a client-server version of the software called SAP R/3 (The "R" was for "Real-time data processing" and 3 was for 3-tier). This new architecture is compatible with multiple platforms and operating systems, such as Microsoft windows or Unix. This opened up SAP to a whole new customer base.