The History of SAP

SAP GmbH was founded in 1972 (Germany) by five former IBM employees. Their challenge was to develop a standard business application software, with the goal of processing business information in real-time.


During 1973, the company released its first financial accounting software, “R1″ (the letter “R” stands for “Real-Time Processing”).

In the late 70s, SAP “R/2″ was released with IBM’s database and a dialogue-oriented business application.

R/2 was stabilized during the early 80s and the company came out with a version capable of processing business transactions in several languages and currencies, to meet the needs of their already growing international clients.

In 1988, SAP GmbH became SAP AG. The “new” company then established subsidiaries in countries such as the United States, Sweden, Denmark, and Italy.

The early 90s saw the introduction of SAP “R/3″, introducing the client-server architecture and GUI, which ran on almost any database, and on most operating systems. SAP R/3 brought a new concept, moving from a “main frame” to a 3-tier architecture (Data layer > Application Layer > Interface layer).

In the beginning of 1996, the company had already more than 9,000 installations worldwide. On the verge of turning the 2k year, SAP had introduced the e-commerce enabled mySAP suite of products for leveraging ever-growing web technology.

SAP began the twenty-first century with the Enterprise Portal and role-based access to business information.

SAP continued to grow and innovate, bringing new technologies to business-information processing.

SAP introduced SAP NetWeaver, the underlying technology framework, which still is based on Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) with application integration across diverse platforms for providing one-stop end-to-end business processing. With NetWeaver, companies can now integrate people, information, and processes.

The future will tell the tendencies but it is a fact that SAP leads innovating initiatives is areas like Mobile, SOA, BPM and Self-Services, across several SAP Application Areas.