SAP was founded in 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung by five former IBM engineers in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg(Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, Klaus Tschira, and Claus Wellenreuther).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 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 exchange.
The founding members Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Klaus E. Tschira and Hans-Werner Hector form the executive board. In 1995, SAP was included in the German stock index DAX. On September 22, 2003, SAP was included in the Dow Jones STOXX 50.In 1991, Prof. Dr. Henning Kagermann joined the board; Dr. Peter Zencke became a board member in 1993.Claus Heinrich and Gerhard Oswald have been members of the SAP Executive Board since 1996. Two years later, in 1998 the first change at the helm takes place. Dietmar Hopp and Klaus Tschira move to the supervisory board, Dietmar Hopp is appointed Chairman of the supervisory board. Henning Kagermann is appointed as Co-Chairman and CEO of SAP next to Hasso Plattner. Werner Brandt joined SAP in 2001 as member of the SAP Executive Board and Chief Financial Officer since 2001.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, then became co-CEO alongside Kagermann in 2008.
Henning Kagermann became the sole CEO of SAP in 2003. 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.
SAP's products focus on
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which it helped to pioneer. The company's main product is SAP ERP. The name of its predecessor SAP R/3 hints at its functionality: the "R" stands for realtime (even though it is not a realtime solution), the number 3 relates to a 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client . R/2, which ran on a Mainframe architecture, was the first SAP version.
SAP ERP is one of five major enterprise applications in SAP's Business Suite. The other four applications are:
customer relationship management (CRM) - helps companies acquire and retain customers, gain deep marketing and customer insight, and align organization on customer-focused strategies
product lifecycle management (PLM) - helps manufacturers with a single source of all product-related information necessary for collaborating with business partners and supporting product lines
supply chain management (SCM) - helps companies enhance operational flexibility across global enterprises and provide real-time visibility for customers and suppliers
supplier relationship management (SRM) - customers can collaborate closely with suppliers and integrate sourcing processes with applications throughout the enterprise to enhance transparency and lower costs.
SAP Labs are the research and development organizations of the parent company. SAP has its labs spread across the globe.
Prominent labs are located in Palo Alto, USA; Bangalore and Gurgaon India, Israel; Montreal and Shanghai, China. SAP Labs located in Bangalore is the largest development unit in terms of number of employees outside the SAP headquarters located in Walldorf, Germany.Other SAP Labs locations include France, Bulgaria and Hungary