SAP is the world's largest enterprise applications software company - as measured by software and service-related revenue - with 172,000 customers around the globe. Unlike many of its competitors, SAP has mostly grown organically and has just a few significant acquisitions under its belt. Much of SAP's customer base consists of very large enterprise accounts. However, they have made significant gains in the small and medium enterprise (SME) market with their Business All-in-One, Business By Design and Business One product lines.

SAP - €System Application & Products€ offers a wide range of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications including customer relationship management (CRM), financial management, human capital management, product life cycle management, and supply chain management. They also have a large network of partners (i.e. the SAP Ecosystem) that provide unique integration and customization offerings for specific markets. For example, Et Alia has developed CREW All-in-One for the construction industry, which is built on SAP Business All-in-One.

In addition to its ERP products, SAP offers several business analytics applications as part of its Business Objects product line. Business Objects is one of SAP's more notable acquisitions which was announced back in 2007. This acquisition pushed SAP into the business intelligence (BI) leaders circle with IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. They are reinforcing their position with recent innovations such as SAP HANA, their in-memory technology that allows organizations to run queries from multiple data sources in real time.

SAP Basis

After extensive developments in SAP, it is now divided into 2 subgroups stating Basis into one and Security into other(Previously Basis consultants used to work on both basis as well as Security issues).

Development

SAP ERP was built from modules comprising the former SAP R/3. SAP R/3 through version 4.6c consisted of various applications on top of SAP Basis, SAP's set of middleware programs and tools. When SAP R/3 Enterprise was launched in 2002, all applications were built on top of the SAP Web Application Server. Extension sets were used to deliver new features and keep the core as stable as possible. The Web Application Server contained all the capabilities of SAP Basis.

As a result of marketing changes and changes in the industry, new versions of SAP have been released. The first edition of mySAP ERP was launched in 2003 and bundled previously separate products, including SAP R/3 Enterprise, SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) and extension sets. The SAP Web Application Server was wrapped into NetWeaver, which was also introduced in 2003.

A complete architecture change took place with the introduction of mySAP ERP edition 2004. R/3 Enterprise was replaced with the introduction of ERP Central Component (SAP ECC). The SAP Business Warehouse, SAP Strategic Enterprise Management and Internet Transaction Server were also merged into SAP ECC, allowing users to run them under one instance. Architectural changes were also made to support an enterprise service architecture to transition customers to a services-oriented architecture. SAP HANA which is a combination of In-memory software and hardware can improve data processing at extremely high speeds.