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SAP AG

SAP AG
Corporate logo of SAP
Type: Aktiengesellschaft (FWB:SAP, NYSE: SAP)
Founded: Weinheim (1972)
Headquarters: Walldorf, Germany
Key people: Henning Kagermann, CEO
Shai Agassi, Development
Industry: Computer software
Products: ERP
Revenue: 8.5billion EUR (2005)
Employees: 32,205
Website: www.sap.com

SAP AG (FWB:SAP, NYSE: SAP) is the largest European software enterprise, with headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. SAP was founded in 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung by five former IBM engineers in Mannheim, Germany. The acronym was later changed to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung ("Systems, Applications And Products in Data Processing") and since the 2005 annual general meeting the company's official name is just SAP AG.

Contents

Reputation

SAP is the third-largest software company in the world. It ranks after Microsoft and Oracle in terms of market capitalization. SAP is the largest business application and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution software provider in terms of revenue.

Products

SAP's products focus on ERP, which it helped to pioneer. The company's main product is SAP R/3; the "R" stands for realtime data processing and the number 3 relates to a 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client (SAPgui). SAP R/3's predecessor was R/2 which ran on a Mainframe architecture.

Other major product offerings include Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO), Business Information Warehouse (BW), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Exchange Infrastructure (XI), Enterprise Portal (EP) and Knowledge Warehouse (KW).

The APO name has been retired and rolled into SCM. The BW name (Business Warehouse) has now been rolled into the SAP NetWeaver BI (Business Intelligence) suite and functions as the reporting module.

The company also offers a new technology platform, named SAP NetWeaver. While its original products are typically used by Fortune 500 companies, SAP is now also actively targeting small and medium sized enterprises (SME) with its SAP Business One and SAP All-in-One.

Reportedly, there are over 100,800 SAP installations at more than 28,000 companies. SAP products are used by over 12 million people in more than 120 countries.

See also

External links



DAX companies of Germany

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