(, ) is the largest
European Software enterprise, headquartered 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''.
SAP is the -largest software company in the world. It ranks after
Microsoft ,
IBM and
Oracle in terms of
Market Capitalization . SAP is the largest
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution software provider in terms of revenue.
SAP is sometimes criticized for its support of
Software Patents .
SAP's products focus on ,
Application Server and
Client (
SAPgui ).
SAP R/3 's predecessor was
R/2 .
Other major product offerings include Advanced Planner and Optimizer (
APO ),
Business Information Warehouse (BW),
Customer Relationship Management (
CRM ),
Supply Chain Management (SCM),
Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS),
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM),
Exchange Infrastructure (XI) and
Knowledge Warehouse (KW).
The APO name has been retired and rolled into SCM. The BW name has also been retired and changed to Business Intelligence.
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
MySAP All-in-One .
Reportedly, there are over 100,600 SAP installations at more than 28,000 companies. SAP products are used by over 12 million people in more than 120 countries.
