SAP is the biggest European software company headquartered in Walldorf, Germany. SAP was founded in 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung by five former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany. The acronym was later changed to mean Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung ("Systems, Applications And Products in Data Processing") but since the Annual General Meeting of 2005, the company's official name is just SAP AG.\n\nAlthough not exactly a household name, SAP is the fourth-largest software company in the world. It ranks after Microsoft, IBM and Oracle in terms of market capitalization. SAP is the largest company in terms of revenue as per latest data, and the largest ERP solution software provider (also in terms of revenue).\n\nSAP's products are in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) business sector. The company's main product is SAP R/3, where the "R" stands for real-time data processing, the number 3 relates to the three tier application architecture: database, application server and client - SAPgui is the desktop software for using SAP R/3. The predecessor to R/3 was R/2. Other major offerings include Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO), Business Information Warehouse (BW), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Knowledge Warehouse (KW). The company also offers a new technology platform, named SAP NetWeaver. While its original products are mostly used by larger companies, SAP is now also offering products for small and medium sized enterprises (SME) with SAP Business One and mySAP All-in-One.\n\nMore than 28,000 companies run SAP, at over 91,500 locations. SAP users number over 12 million people in more than 120 countries.
What is SAP?