Founded in 1972, SAP (Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing) in Walldorf, Germany, is the leading global
provider of client/server business application solutions. Today, more than 12,000 companies in over 50 countries have chosen SAP
client/server and mainframe business applications to manage comprehensive financial, manufacturing, sales and distribution, and
human resources functions essential to their operations. SAP customers have chosen to install SAP's client/server suite in more
than 5,200 sites worldwide, and R/3 is accepted as the standard in several industries, such as oil, chemicals, consumer packaged
goods, and high tech/electronics. SAP is the number one vendor of standard business application software and is the second largest
independent software supplier in the world (after Microsoft) commanding almost a third of the worldwide enterprise application software market. 

SAP markets two major products, R/2 applications for the mainframe environment and R/3 applications for open client/server
systems. Both with R/2 and R/3, customers can opt to install the core system and one or more of the functional components, or
purchase the software as a complete package. The power of SAP software lies in real-time integration, linking a company's
business processes and applications, and supporting immediate responses to change throughout the organisation - on a
departmental, divisional or global scale.