SAP AG - Products

Products

SAP's products focus on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The company's main product is SAP ERP. The current version is SAP ERP 6.0 and is part of the SAP Business Suite. Its previous name was R/3. The "R" of SAP R/3 stood for realtime. The number 3 related to the 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client (SAPgui). R/2, which ran on a Mainframe architecture, was the predecessor of R/3. Before R/2 came System RF, later dubbed R/1.

SAP ERP is one of five enterprise applications in SAP's Business Suite. The other four applications are:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – helps companies acquire and retain customers, gain marketing and customer insight
• Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – helps manufacturers with product-related information
• Supply Chain Management (SCM) – helps companies with the process of resourcing its manufacturing and service processes
• Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) – enables companies to procure from suppliers

Other major product offerings include: the NetWeaver platform, Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) solutions, Duet (joint offering with Microsoft), Performance Management solutions and RFID. SAP offers service-oriented architecture capabilities (calling it Enterprise SOA) in the form of web services that are wrapped around its applications.

While its original products were typically used by Fortune 500 companies, SAP now actively targets small and medium sized enterprises (SME) with its SAP Business One and SAP Business All-in-One.
On 19 September 2007 SAP announced a new product named SAP Business ByDesign. SAP Business ByDesign is a software as a service (SaaS) offering, and provides a fully integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, On Demand. SAP Business ByDesign was previously known under the code name "A1S". In October 2007, SAP AG announced the friendly takeover of Business Objects. This acquisition expanded SAP's Product Suite of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions and increased the customer installed base to 89,000.

In February 2009 SAP AG, which invested in Coghead, purchased the start-up’s intellectual property. SAP will only be using the company’s technology as an internal resource and has no plans to offer Coghead’s products to its customers.

In May 2010 SAP AG announced that it is buying the database software maker Sybase for US$ 5.8 billion in cash. The deal closed at the end of July 2010. Sybase will continue to run as a separate, independent unit but will be leveraged across the other SAP areas.

As of July 2010 TechniData is a 100% subsidiary of SAP AG.

In October 2010, SAP AG announced the release of SAP HANA 1.0 (High-performance Analytics Appliance), an in-memory appliance for Business Intelligence allowing real-time analytics.

SAP Enterprise Learning (environment) is an enhancement of the previous version of the learning management system, SAP Learning Solution 600. Apart from the features in SAP Learning Solution 600, SAP Enterprise Learning (environment) contains a virtual learning room feature powered by Adobe Connect. SAP officials say there are over 100,600 SAP installations serving more than 41,200 companies in more than 25 industries in more than 120 countries.

SAP Press has published a book on SAP Enterprise Learning.

SAP Human Resources Management System is one of the largest modules in the SAP R/3 system which consists of many sub modules that assist with tasks of human resource management.