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SAP AG was founded in 1972 in Mannheim, Germany by a group of ex-IBM engineers with a great idea that fell on deaf ears internally. The five original engineers who developed the concepts ultimately embraced by SAP originally named their company Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung. Their goal was to develop a software package that integrated a company’s myriad business functions in a manner that reflected best practices. Their idea grew into what soon became Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing (SAP).
From day one, SAP was designed to be a global software product engineered on a multilingual and multinational platform. Additionally, the engineers from IBM wanted to break away from the monolithic architecture model that defined mainframes and their applications of the daythey wanted to open the doors to a variety of hardware, operating system, and database platforms, thereby giving SAP’s customers flexibility and choice. These revolutionary and innovative design features are what made SAP Germany’s top software vendor only a few short years after its core product hit the marketplace.
Today, SAP AG reigns as the undisputed market leader in Enterprise Applications software. SAP is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol SAP. SAP AG offers comprehensive industry solutions atop their flagship R/3 and ECC products (so as to afford access to industry-specific best practices and processes), among these SAP Aerospace & Defense, SAP Automotive, SAP Banking, SAP Chemicals, SAP Consumer Products, SAP Engineering & Construction, SAP Healthcare, SAP High Tech, SAP Insurance, SAP Media, SAP Oil & Gas, SAP Pharmaceuticals, SAP Public Sector, SAP Retail, SAP Service Provider, SAP Telecommunications, SAP Utilities, and othersnearly 30 industries are addressed by these solution sets
NetWeaver is an application builder from SAP for integrating business processes and databases from a number of sources while exploiting the leading Web services technologies. Part of the company's mySAP product group, NetWeaver is getting a lot of industry attention as the first fully interoperable Web-based cross-application platform that can be used to develop not only SAP applications but others as well. NetWeaver allows a developer to integrate information and processes from geographically dispersed locations using diverse technologies, including Microsoft's .NET, IBM's WebSphere and Sun's Java technologies.
NetWeaver has been tagged as a product that could help spur industry adoption of Web services. Although Web services are often seen as the development model of the future, the implementation rate has not been high, often because of competition and incompatibility between enabling products. At a January 2003 press conference, Microsoft's Bill Gates anticipated that NetWeaver would increase the adoption rate of Web services.
NetWeaver is SAP's integrated technology platform and is the technical foundation for all SAP applications since the SAP Business Suite. SAP NetWeaver is marketed as a service-oriented application and integration platform. SAP NetWeaver provides the development and runtime environment for SAP applications and can be used for custom development and integration with other applications and systems. SAP NetWeaver is built using open standards and industry de facto standards and can be extended with, and interoperate with, technologies such as Microsoft .NET, Sun Java EE, and IBM WebSphere.
SAP NetWeaver's release is considered as a strategic move by SAP for driving enterprises to run their business on a single, integrated platform that includes both applications and technology. Industry analysts refer to this type of integrated platform offering as an "applistructure" (applications + infrastructure). It is widely held that this approach is driven by industry's need to lower IT costs through an enterprise architecture that is at once (1) more flexible; (2) better integrated with applications; (3) built on open standards to ensure future interoperability and broad integration; and, (4) provided by a vendor that is financially viable for the long term.[citation needed]
SAP is fostering relationships with system integrators and independent software vendors, many of the latter becoming "Powered by SAP NetWeaver".
SAP NetWeaver is part of SAP's plan to transition to a more open, service-oriented architecture and to deliver the technical foundation of its applications on a single, integrated platform and common release cycle.
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