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What is SAP?
SAP = Systems Application Programing is an Integrated Enterprise Resource Planner, Using which you can effectively manage your 4 M's (Money, Material, Manufacturing & Machines…) SAP stands for S ystems A pplications and P roducts in Data Processing. Designed and developed by 5 IBM engineers during the 1970s as a standards based software alternative to custom built ERP software, SAP has come a long way. SAP has been in the forefront of ERP software ever since. SAP develops ERP products to be used by companies to manage their enterprise. This includes managing their day to day operations, logistics, finances, month end, quarter end and yearly activities, reporting, HR etc. Although there are a couple of other ERP vendors who do the same, the key differentiator for SAP is the way in which SAP integrates all these operations and makes for a seamless system that is both easy to use and at the same time sophisticated enough to include all kinds of complex activities that are needed for any kind of enterprise. Examples of some of these activities could, be running Material resource planning, recruiting and managing an employee's lifecycle, disbursing payrolls, recording all financial transactions and drawing balance sheets and P/L statements of the company etc. Now imagine a single system that takes care of all these diverse activities and still keep them well integrated. SAP was initially designed to be run on the mainframe and was called that release was called R/2 (Release 2). SAP quickly caught on to the client server model with a later release called R/3 and this was the most popular version of SAP. After R/3, later versions of their core software were launched called Enterprise Central Component (ECC). The automation needs of an enterprise are endless. SAP soon realized that corporations needed business intelligence to mine data from their daily operational data and extract meaningful trends that could enable further business opportunities. SAP BW was born and morphed into BI after buying out Business Objects (BO). After the hugely successful R/3, SAP created more and more niche software like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), SRM, XI (now called Process Integration or PI) and once again living up to the standards of SAP by maintaining tight integration with their core ECC software. Through the process of developing these software components, SAP has slowly moved from standard client server architecture to a completely web-based architecture where every transaction can be run from just a browser. These new dimension products developed on the web standards based framework (NetWeaver) are all under new umbrella called mySAP. ( Full Answer )