History
SAP was founded in the year 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung ("System Analysis and Program Development")[3] by five former IBM engineers in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg (Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, Klaus E. Tschira, and Claus Wellenreuther).[4] At the time they left IBM, the ex-employees were quite senior engineers in IBM Germany rather than founding engineers in the sense of Hewlett-Packard's founders.
As part of the Xerox exit strategy from the computer industry, Xerox retained IBM to migrate their business systems to IBM technology. As part of IBM's compensation for the migration, IBM acquired the SDS/SAPE software, reportedly for a contract credit of $80,000. The SAPE software was given by IBM to the founding ex-IBM employees in exchange for founding stock provided to IBM, reportedly 8%. ICI was SAP's first ever customer in 1972.
The acronym was later changed to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung ("Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing").
In 1976, "SAP GmbH" was founded and the following year, it moved its headquarters to Walldorf. SAP AG became the company's official name after the 2005 annual general meeting (AG is short for Aktiengesellschaft).
In August 1988, SAP GmbH transferred into SAP AG (a corporation by German law), and public trading started November 4. Shares are listed on the Frankfurt and Stuttgart stock exchanges.[4]
Four of the founding members -- Hopp, Plattner, Tschira and Hector -- form the executive board. In 1995, SAP was included in the German stock index DAX. On 22 September 2003, SAP was included in the Dow Jones STOXX 50.[5] In 1991, Prof. Dr. Henning Kagermann joined the board; Dr. Peter Zencke became a board member in 1993.[6] Claus Heinrich,[7] and Gerhard Oswald have been members of the SAP Executive Board since 1996. Two years later, in 1998, the first change at the helm took place. Dietmar Hopp and Klaus Tschira moved to the supervisory board and Dietmar Hopp was appointed Chairman of the supervisory board. Henning Kagermann was appointed as Co-Chairman and CEO of SAP next to Hasso Plattner. Werner Brandt joined SAP in 2001 as a member of the SAP Executive Board and Chief Financial Officer.[9] Léo Apotheker has been a member of the SAP Executive Board and president of Global Customer Solutions & Operations since 2002, was appointed Deputy CEO in 2007, and then became co-CEO alongside Kagermann in 2008.
Henning Kagermann became the sole CEO of SAP in 2003.[10] In February 2007 his contract was extended until 2009. After continuous disputes over the responsibility of the development organization, Shai Agassi, a member of the executive board who had been named as a potential successor to Kagermann, left the organization.[11] In April 2008, along with the announcement of Leo Apotheker as co-CEO, the SAP supervisory board also appointed to the SAP Executive Board, three new members, effective 1 July 2008: Corporate Officers Erwin Gunst, Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.
Milestones technical solutions
In 1973 the SAP R/1 solution was launched.[13] Six years later, in 1979, SAP launched SAP R/2.[13] In 1981, SAP brought a completely re-designed solution to market. With the change from R/2 to R/3 in 1992, SAP followed the trend from mainframe computing to client-server architectures. The development of SAPu2019s internet strategy with mySAP.com redesigned the concept of business processes (integration via Internet).[4] SAP was awarded Industry Weeku2019s Best Managed Companies in 1999
Business and markets
SAP is the world's second largest business software company and the third-largest independent software provider in terms of revenues.[15] It operates in three geographic regions u2013 EMEA, which represents Europe, Middle East and Africa; the Americas (SAP America, headquartered in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania), which represents both North America and Latin America; and Asia Pacific Japan (APJ), which represents Japan, Australia, India and parts of Asia. In addition, SAP operates a network of 115 subsidiaries, and has R&D facilities around the globe in Germany, North America, Canada, China, Hungary, India, Israel and Bulgaria.
SAP focuses on six industry sectors: process industries, discrete industries, consumer industries, service industries, financial services, and public services.[16] It offers more than 25 industry solution portfolios for large enterprises[17] and more than 550 micro-vertical solutions for midsize companies and small businesses.[18]
SAP and Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture
Service-oriented architecture moves the ERP landscape toward software-based and web services-based business activities. This move increases adaptability, flexibility, openness and efficiency. The move towards E-SOA helps companies reuse software components and not have to rely as much on in-house enterprise resource planning hardware technologies which helps make ERP adoption more attractive for small- or mid-sized companies.
According to a press fact sheet from SAP, "SAP is the only enterprise applications software vendor that is both building service-orientation directly into its solutions and providing a technology platform (SAP NetWeaver) and guidance to support companies in the development of their own service-oriented architectures spanning both SAP and non-SAP solutions."
SAP E-SOA Authentication
SAP E-SOA, client certificate-based authentication is the only authentication method (besides username/password) and the only Single Sign-On method to be supported across all SAP technologies. Kerberos and logon tickets, for example, are not compatible with SAP service-oriented architecture. [20
Products
SAP's products focus on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The company's main product is SAP ERP. The current product is called the SAP Business Suite (also known as SAP ERP 6.0). It's previous product was called R/3. The "R" of SAP R/3 stood for realtime - even though it is not a realtime solution. The number 3 related to the 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client (SAPgui). R/2, which ran on a Mainframe architecture, was the predecessor of R/3. Before R/2 came System RF, later dubbed R/1.
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