SAP

SAP SE (/ˌɛs.eɪˈpiː/; German pronunciation: [ɛsʔaːˈpeː] ^ⓘ) is a German multinational software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The company is the world's largest vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

SAP GbR became in 1981 fully Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung (Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing) abbreviated SAP GmbH after a five-year transition period beginning in 1976. In the late 1980s, it further restructured itself as SAP AG. Since 7 July 2014, its corporate structure is that of a pan-European societas Europaea (SE); as such, its former German corporate identity is now a subsidiary, SAP Deutschland SE & Co. KG. It has regional offices in 180 countries and over 111,961 employees.

SAP is a component of the DAX and Euro Stoxx 50 stock market indices. The company is the largest non-American software company by revenue and the world's fifth-largest publicly traded software company by revenue. In June 2025, it was the largest European company by market capitalization, as well as one of the 30 most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.

When Xerox exited the computer hardware manufacturing industry in 1971, it asked IBM to migrate its business systems to IBM technology. As part of IBM's compensation for the migration, IBM was given the rights to the Scientific Data Systems (SDS)/SAPE software repository. Five IBM engineers from the AI department (Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, and Claus Wellenreuther, all from Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg) were working on an enterprise-wide system based on this software, only to be told that it would no longer be necessary. Rather than abandoning the project, they decided to leave IBM Tech and start another company. In June 1972 they founded the SAP Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung ("System Analysis and Program Development" / "SAPD") company, as a private partnership under the German Civil Code.

Their first client was the German branch of Imperial Chemical Industries in Östringen, where they developed mainframe programs for payroll and accounting. Instead of storing the data on punch cards mechanically, as IBM did, they stored it locally in the Electronic System while using a common Logical database for all activities of Organization.^{[clarification needed]} Therefore, they called their software a real-time system, since there was no need to process the punch cards overnight (for this reason their flagship product carried an R in its name until the late 1990s). This first version was also a standalone software that could be offered to other interested parties.

In 1973, SAP launched its first commercial product, the RF financial accounting system. This system served as the cornerstone in the ongoing development of other software modules of the system that eventually bore the name SAP R/1. This offered a common system for multiple tasks. This permitted the use of a centralized data storage, improving the maintenance of data. From a technical point of view, therefore, a database was necessary.

In 1976 SAP GmbH Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung ("Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing") was founded as a sales and support subsidiary. Five years later, the private partnership was dissolved and its rights were passed on to SAP GmbH.The headquarters moved the following year to Walldorf, Germany.

In 1979, SAP launched SAP R/2, expanding the capabilities of the system to other areas, such as materials management and production planning.