Incorporated: 1976
NAIC: 511210 Software Publishers; 334611 Software Reproducing;
SIC: 7372 Prepackaged Software; 7373 Computer Integrated Systems Design; 7379 Computer Related Services Nec
SAP AG is the third-largest independent software supplier worldwide and the largest producer of standard enterprisewide business applications for the client-server software market. The company's principal business activities are the development and marketing of an integrated line of computer software for over 1,000 predefined business processes, from financial accounting, supply chain management, and business work flow to human resources, sales and distribution, and customer relationship management. The largest software group in Europe, its business software applications are used by over 13,500 companies around the world in such industries as chemicals, high tech, telecommunications, electronics, utilities, oil and gas, banking, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, consumer products, automotive, and retail. Through its 76 international subsidiaries, led by its U.S. subsidiary SAP America, SAP markets its software and consulting, training, and support services in more than 120 countries.
SAP AG was founded in 1972 by five German engineers with IBM in Mannheim, Germany; interestingly three of the founders, Hasso Plattner, Dietmar Hopp, and Klaus Tschira, were still with SAP in mid-2001. When an IBM client asked IBM to provide enterprise-wide software to run on its mainframe, the five engineers began writing the program only to be told the assignment was being transferred to another unit. Rather than abandon the project altogether, they left IBM and founded SAP in Walldorf, near Heidelberg. While the company originally took its name from the abbreviation for Systemanalyse und Programmenentwicklung (systems analysis and program development), SAP eventually came to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen, und Produkte in Datenverarbeitung (systems, applications, and products in data processing).
Without the benefit of loans from banks, venture capitalists, or the German government, SAP began fashioning its software business gradually through cash flow generated by an ever-growing stable of customers. Working at night on borrowed computers to land their first contracts, Plattner and colleagues built SAP's client list with German firms in its region, beginning with a German subsidiary of the global chemical company ICI and later adding such major German multinationals as Siemens and BMW.
Operating in a corporate computing climate in which business programs were designed to provide only specific, isolated solutions with no relevance to a company's other applications--let alone any outside company's needs--the idea of a fully integrated software product that could be tailored to any company's business proved a hard sell at first. However, because SAP produced software, a nonlabor-intensive product, it was able to avoid the labor agreements and high costs that plague many German manufacturing start-ups. In 1976 SAP declared itself a GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung) corporation, or limited company, and by 1978 it was selling its financial accounting software to 40 corporate customers.
In 1978 SAP began developing, and the following year released, R/2 (R for "real-time"), a mainframe-based, standard business software suite in which integrated modules for accounting, sales and distribution, and production enabled customers to consolidate their financial and operational data into a single database and eliminate costly paperwork and data entry. Because the modules were self-standing, businesses could selectively choose what they needed, which could then be customized to their unique requirements. The promise of real-time integration of mission-critical corporate data, viewable through the spreadsheet-like windows of specialized software, offered the potential for uniform data flow, streamlined business operations, and centralized decision-making.
Relying on word of mouth filtering through the overseas branches of its German customers, SAP soon began selling its software outside Europe. With corporate giants like Dow Chemical and Bayer already running R/2, SAP could rely on the fear of obsolescence of its customers' rivals to sell its software to the major competitors in each industry. Among the large corporations that began to adopt R/2 were du Pont, General Mills, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Heinz, and Shell Oil, as well as 80 of the 100 largest companies in Germany, such as Hoechst, Daimler Benz, and BASF. By 1991 R/2 had gone through four releases or versions and had established itself as the standard for integrated corporate business software in Europe. By 1994 SAP could claim more than 1,400 R/2 installations worldwide.
As R/2's potential began to peak in the mid-1980s, Plattner and the company's former employer IBM, announced SAA (system applications architecture), a new technology in which all IBM operating systems and platforms would be fully harmonized so that code written for one product would work with any other. Seeing the ramifications of such a high level of integration for its own products, in 1987 SAP began developing R/3 for use in the decentralized, non-mainframe computing environment known as client-server. In client-server arrangements, data is processed not by a single costly mainframe but by many cheaper networked "server" computers, which display their data on flexibly arrangeable PCs called "clients."
While R/2 focused on providing data-processing solutions for static, individual functions of business operations, such as inventory tracking or shipping, R/3 was designed to allow a business to view its entire business operation as a single-integrated process in which data entered into any single application in the system would simultaneously be registered in every other application. In theory, a company's entire data network would now be a cohesive, interpretable whole that would enable management to more efficiently allocate resources, develop products, manage inventory, forecast trends, streamline manufacturing processes, and automate routine operations.
R/3 itself consisted of IBM's OS/2 operating system as its "front end" or user interface; IBM's DB2 program as its database component; and SAP's own proprietary application component, which was based on AT&T's UNIX operating system because it offered the greatest functionality with other vendors' systems. Thus the three-tiered architecture was created--interface or desktop + database + application--on which all later versions of R/3 would be based.
By 1987 SAP had grown to 450 employees and boasted sales of DM 150 million. And although no less than 27 percent of this was plowed back into research, in 1988 SAP GmbH formally converted itself to a publicly traded Aktiengesellschaft (AG) to raise even more capital for research and development.
SAP had established its first operations outside Germany in the mid-1980s, but it was not until the creation of a Swiss-based subsidiary, SAP International, in the late 1980s that it began the expansion that would make it a truly international player in the global client-server software market.
In 1988 it established SAP America in Philadelphia, staffing it initially with transplanted German managers. SAP executives soon realized, however, that an American team was more likely to be able to maneuver through the idiosyncrasies of the U.S. software market and soon began hiring U.S. professionals. One important result was the abandonment of traditional German business practices in favor of a more American approach: lifting limits, for example, on how much salespeople could earn in commissions and submitting budgets in which fully one-third of all annual resources were devoted to product marketing. Fueled by the release of R/3 in 1992, SAP America began to grow into SAP AG's most profitable subsidiary, expanding from two U.S. offices to 20 between 1992 and 1995.
After five years in development, R/3 had been launched with the expectation that it would complement R/2's multinational-oriented niche by extending SAP's reach into the mid-sized, less mainframe-dominated business software market. Unexpectedly, however, R/3's release coincided with a growing trend toward corporate downsizing, and even SAP's largest customers began eyeing R/3 as a less labor-intensive replacement for R/2. As a result, in the space of one year (1992-93), the percentage of SAP America's total revenue generated by R/3 catapulted from 5 to 80 percent, and R/2's status as SAP's flagship product dwindled from 95 percent of revenues to only 20 percent. R/3 was suddenly hot, and virtually overnight SAP had translated its reputation as Germany's wunderfirma to the global stage.
On the strength of R/3's rocketing sales, by the mid-1990s SAP had traveled from the relative anonymity of 1992 to the business applications vendor of choice for nine of the ten largest U.S. corporations, one-third of the Fortune 500, seven of the ten largest Business Week Global 1000, and 80 percent of the Fortune 100 companies in software, computers, peripherals, and semiconductors. Total sales revenues had nearly tripled between 1991 and 1995 to DM 2.7 billion and had increased 66 percent between 1993 and 1994. Such major corporations as Apple, Chevron, Colgate-Palmolive, Digital Equipment, and Polaroid were jumping on the R/3 bandwagon, and by September 1995 SAP could claim over 1,100 installations of R/3 for companies with $1 billion or more in sales (in addition to 700 R/2 installations), and more than 1,300 installations in smaller companies (with 800 R/2 installations). SAP's share price had in the meantime grown 1,000 percent since its introduction on the German stock exchange in 1988, and by 1996 it ranked as the highest valued company in Germany.
Two years into the R/3 boom, SAP's sales to German companies, once its sole market, had fallen to 37 percent; North American sales accounted for one-third of all revenues; and the Asia-Pacific market was expected to reach the same level by the year 2000. With two-thirds of all sales revenues now coming from its foreign subsidiaries, in 1996 SAP relocated most of its marketing operation to its Wayne, Pennsylvania, complex. Between 1992 and 1996, it opened subsidiaries in South Africa, Malaysia, Japan, the Czech Republic, Russia, mainland China, and Mexico among others, and was making R/3 available in 14 foreign languages including Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Thai.
As SAP's global market share in client-server applications began to climb toward 30 percent, new versions of R/3 were released to enhance customizability, reduce installation time, and extend the number of business processes the product addressed. Version 3.0, released in 1995, offered modules in four basic business areas: financial, sales and distribution, manufacturing and logistics, and human resources. A complete R/3 system involved more than 75 modules, 7,000 tables controlling over 3,000 processes, as many as 17 million lines of code, and an installation time of seven to nine months. While individual modules were priced at about $100,000 each, the total installation tab for the average customer (excluding consultants' fees) amounted to $1 million. Complete installations, however, including software, hardware, and system integration, were known to climb as high as $30 million.
If the corporate world's sudden enthusiasm for the R/3 solution at times resembled a religious conversion, there was never a scarcity of heretical dissent. Some customers began to complain of the extreme complexity of R/3's structure, which forced users to search through several layers of menus before finding the application they wanted to run. Configuring the product to conform to the highly particular needs of corporate clients took months and sometimes over a year to complete, and the third-party consultants hired to guide clients through the installation ordeal often had little practical experience or abandoned customers for more lucrative projects midway through. The rule of thumb that corporations should prepare to spend one dollar on consultants for every dollar spent on software became an object of nostalgia as consultant-to-software expense ratios for R/3 installations rose to four and even ten to one.
As SAP began to enjoy the monolithic status of Microsoft and IBM it was also accused of arrogantly forcing its system on customers who could not use R/3 unless it was modified to conform to their unique business practices. Finally, some corporate information technology managers, taking the dictum: "You don't get fired for buying SAP" too close to heart, were convincing their companies to invest in R/3 without examining whether they really needed a system so robust, or whether it would create the efficiencies that would justify its cost.
SAP's two major competitors, Oracle Systems (United States) and Baan (the Netherlands), were meanwhile making inroads into SAP's market share. Although Oracle's database product was the program most often used as R/3's database component--making SAP the largest value-added reseller of Oracle products--in 1995 Oracle announced it would overtake SAP as the world's leading provider of industry-specific software within three years. Baan, though dwarfed by SAP in sales and customers, scored major coups in the mid-1990s when both Boeing and German giant Siemens Nixdorf rejected R/3 in favor of Baan's quick-installing business software package. SAP Board Member Henning Kagermann dismissed the setbacks, telling the Deutsche Presse Agentur, "If SAP wins a large order, it's accepted as natural. When we lose a potential customer, immediately it's a big headline." SAP management also dispelled the severity of the threat posed by Oracle, pointing out that when in head-to-head competition SAP still won the contract 80 percent of the time.
Two public relations disasters in the mid-1990s suggested not only the extent of the controversy that had begun to surround R/3 but also SAP's savvy in handling criticism. In March 1995 the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche published an article accusing SAP of accepting commissions from hardware vendors for computers sold to SAP customers and quoted several users' disparaging remarks about the expense and installation time required by R/3. As share prices nose-dived, SAP lashed back. Its hardware partners unanimously denied any kickback arrangement with SAP, and SAP itself took out a court order on the magazine for inaccuracy and deliberate misquotation and ran four-page ads in major German print outlets in which the article's sources claimed they were misquoted and expressed satisfaction with R/3.
Then, in early 1996 U.S. computer industry analyst Forrester Research published a study in which it argued that SAP's R/3 was based on an obsolete architecture that could not keep pace with the open, nonproprietary architecture increasingly favored by the software industry. SAP, Forrester claimed, knew that R/3 would be obsolete by 1997 and secretly planned to foist a brand-new "object-based" system called R/10 on its customers in 1999, masking its deployment through a series of add-ons to R/3. All SAP customers, Forrester advised, should minimize their dependency on R/3 and prepare "exit strategies" to avoid being trapped into an expensive installation of a new SAP product.
SAP reacted by prematurely releasing quarterly financial figures showing that R/3 sales had not in fact peaked and by vehemently denying that it was planning to abandon R/3. It further vowed to spend DM3 billion on research and development over the next five years and announced plans for new versions of R/3 that reflected its willingness to make the product, which was based on its own proprietary programming language and more open to integration with other vendors' products. SAP, moreover, signaled it was embracing the Internet-driven trend toward "object-oriented" software in which applications could be embedded with other vendors' mini-programs (called "objects" or "applets"). The strategy worked, and Forrester Research was soon announcing that SAP was "leading in the new Internet game."
In the mid-1990s industry observers agreed that SAP's continued dominance of the client-server business software market rested on its ability to stay ahead of the breathtaking pace of change in the global software market. In the mid-1990s, for example, SAP was directly affected by the rise of the "intranet," a version of the Internet created by companies as in-house data networks, mirroring the structure and appearance of the World Wide Web but protected from the cybersurfing public by so-called firewalls. With the potential to perform many of the same business applications and data-processing features of R/3, such intranets represented a plausible challenge to SAP's market leadership. SAP responded by announcing new features that would turn R/3 into an Internet-capable tool. Using a browser connected to the web, for example, two companies with R/3 installed in their systems could process orders in real time over the Internet, while consumers could order products electronically from a company's online catalog and be confident the order was registered immediately in the company's R/3 system.
SAP's ability to sustain its success also depended on its willingness to continue working, à la Microsoft, with its hundreds of strategic partner firms throughout the computer and services industries. SAP's Platform Partners program, for example, had enabled it to cooperate with computer manufacturers such as Compaq and IBM in tailoring SAP products to new hardware developments. And its partnership program with such Big Six accounting firms as Arthur Andersen and Price Waterhouse had spawned a lucrative new subindustry of R/3 consultants whose institutional independence from SAP enabled it to focus more of its resources on improving its product. Finally, SAP's participation with other software vendors in industry-wide initiatives (such as the Open Application Group) to determine standards for new technologies, demonstrated its willingness to cooperate with potential competitors to ensure the continued functionality and influence of its own products.
Significantly, in 1994 SAP formed an alliance with American software giant Microsoft to make SAP software integrated with such Microsoft products as Windows NT, an operating system for networked computers, and SQL Server, a database product. In 1995 Microsoft returned the favor by selecting R/3 for its global finance and accounting data system.
Sales at SAP continued at a brisk pace, soaring to $3.5 billion in 1997, 44 percent of which was derived from its U.S. operations. With complementary and even competing software firms rushing to plug in their products or components to R/3, SAP had succeeded in establishing its product as the "business backbone." SAP's own staff had by then grown to 17,000 employees.
To rein in R/3's ever-increasing capabilities and complexities, SAP deployed a number of new customer initiatives, including a fast-track program to expedite the sales and installation process, and business units to tailor software packages for specific industries. By 1998, SAP's range of industry-specific applications extended to 17 different sectors including aviation, hospitals, automotive, and the military. Diligent efforts were also made to simplify R/3's complex graphical interface and create a friendlier look and feel.
Despite its wild success with R/3, SAP nearly failed to keep pace with rapid changes in the global software marketplace. By the late 1990s, competitors were starting to build versatile functions into their products to exploit the intensifying "business-to-business" Internet marketplace, and as quickly as SAP had captured the market, it was now coming under fire from vendors, employees, and industry observers who lamented its lack of vision and resistance to change.
In February 1999 SAP executives arrived at a new strategy to deploy in time for the New Millennium. The result was mySAP.com, a web-enabled platform that combined enterprise resource planning (similar to that of R/3) with a series of specialty business software applications such as supply chain management and customer relationship management. Viewed through a role-based, customized web browser window, mySAP.com applications were developer-friendly and capable of integrating with other vendors' databases, applications, operating systems, and hardware. The new platform also extended to electronic business (e-business) marketplaces and corporate web portals, which further linked partner companies together and enabled them to collaborate and conduct transactions with one another whether they were using SAP or non-SAP applications.
The concept of mySAP.com at first proved unclear to customers, even after a $50 million advertising campaign. When crucial U.S. revenues dropped in the first quarter of 2000, management responded with drastic measures. A reorganization of the company's development staff working on product lines was the first step in transforming an internally focused corporate culture into one more customer-centric and better suited for competition in U.S. markets, where business-to-business Internet sales were predicted to skyrocket to $2.7 trillion by 2004. To ensure that products were developed with maximum customer input, SAP America enlisted 100 customers to help write code. Further, SAP's entire marketing department was relocated from Germany to Manhattan.
The company's efforts paid off and by the second quarter of 2001, total revenues reached $1.85 billion, an increase of 24 percent from the previous year. Revenues from mySAP.com's customer relationship management software increased to $104 million, a 55 percent jump from the previous quarter. Significantly, revenues from its supply chain management software jumped 46 percent to $150 million, giving SAP a 9 percent share and the lead in the supply chain management arena.
As virtually the only software developer not to issue profit warnings in 2001, SAP's higher-than-expected financial results beat analyst forecasts in an otherwise gloomy technology sector. And contrary to the sluggish economy, as Co-Chief Executive Plattner recognized in a June 2001 interview with Computing Canada, "It's a time for opportunity."
In the space of one year, 15,000 customers in SAP's R/3 installed base had transitioned to mySAP.com, with the number of licensed users quadrupling to four million. Anticipating that sales of mySAP.com applications would eventually replace those of R/3, SAP predicted that between 80 to 100 percent of its existing customers would migrate to the new platform by 2006.
A significant contract to outfit Nestle Corporation with mySAP.com specialty applications lent critical weight and authority to the new platform. SAP procured similar contracts with other high-profile companies such as Compaq Computers, Cadbury Schweppes, and Nokia. In addition, a slew of U.S.-based subsidiaries was created to support product development and innovation, including application hosting and third-party technologies.
New alliances also helped to strengthen SAP's venture into e-commerce territory. In one such alliance, SAP joined forces with Commerce One to develop e-marketplaces or online trading exchanges where goods and services could be bought or sold. Following the formation of SAP Portals in 2001, SAP teamed up with Yahoo! to develop customized enterprise portals; SAP further bolstered its strength in the enterprise portal market through its acquisition of TopTier Software.
Through its new mySAP.com platform, particularly its specialty applications in supply chain and customer relationship management, SAP appeared to have successfully positioned itself to capitalize on the flourishing e-business market. By nimbly responding to competitive challenges and technological advances, and learning to better market its products, SAP would no doubt remain a formidable presence in the global business software market.
Principal Subsidiaries
SAP America Inc.; SAP Canada; SAP Japan Co. Ltd.; SAP Asia Pte. Ltd. (Singapore); SAP Hong Kong; SAP Software System Co., Ltd. (Beijing); SAP Australia PTY LTD; SAP Mexico, S.A. DE C.V.; SAP-M GmbH; SAP Retail Solutions GmbH & Co.; SAPMarkets Europe GmbH; Steeb Anwendungssysteme GmbH; SAP CRM Consulting GmbH & Co.; eSAP GmbH & Co.; SAPHosting AG & Co. SAP Learning Solutions GmbH; In-Q-MY Technologies GmbH; DACOS Software Holding GmbH; SAP Retail Solutions; eSAP, SAP CRM Consulting; SAPHosting, SAP GmbH; SAP (UK) Limited, SAP France S.A., (France); SAP (Schweiz) AG (Switzerland); SAP Nederland B.V. (Netherlands); SAP Italia S.p.A. (Italy); SAP Österreich GmbH (Austria); NV SAP Belgium SA, SAP (Spain) SA; SAPSA (PTY) LTD. (South Africa); SAP SA (Sweden); SAP Denmark A/S; SAP (Finland) Oy; SAP (Portugal); SAPSA, SAP CR, spol. s r.o. (Czech Republic); SAP Polska Sp. z.o.o., (Poland); SAP Norge AS, (Norway); SAP Hungary Rendszerek (Hungary); SAP Consult C.I.S. (Russia); SAP Hellas S.A. (Greece); SAP Slovensko s.r.o. (Slovakia); SAP Service and Support Centre (Ireland) Limited; Public Services (PTY) Ltd., (South Africa; 70%); CADRA S.A. (France); SAP-OFEK Ltd. (Israel); SAP Labs (France) S.A.; SAP Systems Integration (Schweiz) AG (Switzerland; 54%); IN-Q-MY Labs Limited (Bulgaria); e-sap.fr, (France); SAP Cyprus Ltd. (Cyprus); SAP Bulgaria Ltd. (Bulgaria); SAP (Nigeria) Ltd.; Ithinqcom (PTY) Ltd., (South Africa; 60%); SAP Ireland Ltd. (Ireland); SAP Consult (Ukraine); SAP Public Services, Inc., Washington, D.C.; TopTier Software, Inc. (USA); SAP Labs, Inc. (USA); SAP Brasil Ltda. (Brazil); SAP Andina Y del Caribe C.A. (Venezuela); SAP Argentina S.A.; SAPMarkets, Inc. (USA); Campbell Software, Inc. (USA); SAP International, Inc. (USA); SAP Properties, Inc. (USA); SAP Investment, Inc. (USA); SAP Korea Limited; SAP India Systems Private Limited; SAP Malaysia SDN. BHD.; SAP Taiwan Co. Ltd.; SAP (Beijing) Software System Co., Ltd. (China); SAP Labs India Private Limited (India); SAP Systems Ltd. (Thailand); SAP Asia, (Indonesia); SAP Philippines, Inc.; SAP New Zealand Limited; SAPMarkets Asia Pacific Solutions Pte. Ltd. (Singapore); SAP India (Holding) Pte. Ltd. (Singapore); SAP Systems Integration AG (54%).
Principal Competitors
Oracle Corporation; PeopleSoft, Inc.; Siebel Systems, Inc.; Baan Company N.V.; i2 Technologies, Inc.
Further Reading
Bartholomew, Doug, "Hasso Plattner: Growing Software's Quiet Giant," Industry Week, December 21, 1998, pp. 39-44.
"Can SAP Swim with the Swiftest?," Business Week, June 26, 2000, p. 46.
Culp, Eric, and O'Brien Browne, "SAP Contends with Its Own Success," The European, July 27, 1998, p. 20.
Edmondson, Gail, "America's Latest Software Success Story Is German," Business Week, August 8, 1994, p. 46.
Fondiller, David S., "Client Serving," Forbes, July 4, 1994, p. 130.
Hamm, Steve, "All Abooarrrd!: SAP America and SAP AG Gain Momentum," PC Week, July 17, 1995, p. A1.
Hilson, Gary, "Latest R/3 Tackles Integration with SAP Web Tools," Computing Canada, May 4, 2001, p. 1.
------, "SAP Branches Out to E-Business Market Space," Computing Canada, June 29, 2001, pp. 1-2.
"Less Ego, More Success," Business Week, July 23, 2001, pp. 56-59.
Lieber, Ronald, "Here Comes SAP," Fortune, October 2, 1995.
MacMillan, Michael, "SAP Sees R/3 Ending as Mysap.com Flies," Computing Canada, June 23, 2000, p. 1.
McKendrick, Joseph, "SAP Begins to Battle for Midmarket Sector," Ent, December 9, 1998, p. 12.
Mitchell, Ian, "Late E-Commerce Start Hits SAP," Computer Weekly, July 20, 2000, p. 24.
Nee, Eric, "Hasso Plattner and Klaus Besier: An Interview with Eric Nee," Upside, December 1995.
Ricciuti, Mike, and J. William Semich, "SAP's Client/Server Battle Plan," Datamation, March 15, 1993, pp. 26-32.
Saltz-Trautman, Peggy, "Creating an Industry," International Business, February 1996.
Songini, Marc, "MySAP Sells Despite Foggy Marketing," Computerworld, June 25, 2001, p. 24.
Stedman, Craig, "R/3 Stymies Users," Computerworld, September 21, 1998, p. 100.
------, "SAP to Streamline R/3 Interface," Computerworld, December 14, 1998, p. 20.
Steinmetz, Greg, "German Firm Grows, Silicon-Valley Style," Wall Street Journal, April 11, 1995, p. A16.
Stone, Martin, "ERP Davids Nipping at Goliath SAP's Heels: Study," Computing Canada, November 2, 1998, pp. 23-26.
Sullivan, Thomas, "Microsoft, SAP Tie SQL Service 7.0 to R/3," Ent, September 23, 1998.
Sweat, Jeff, "ERP: The Corporate Ecosystem," Informationweek, October 12, 1998, pp. 42-52.
"The Prudent Approach to R/3," The Forrester Report, April 1996.
Waters, Richard, "SAP America Faces Up to Challenge of Change," The Financial Times, June 13, 2001, p. 30.
Zeitz, William A., "SAP R/3: Dream or Nightmare?," ComputerWorld, January 29, 1996. p. 101.
— Paul S. Bodine; Update: Suzanne P. Selvaggi
