What is SAP? Use of SAP ERP? History of SAP ?

Basic information about the SAP Pacakage

SAP is the leader of ERP software vendor.Enterprise Resource Planning is a back office application for Enterprise

SAP AG is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software. The company's best-known software products are its enterprise resource planning application (SAP ERP), its enterprise data warehouse solution - SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP BusinessObjects software, and most recently, Sybase mobile products and in-memory computing appliance SAP HANA. SAP is one of the largest software companies in the world.

SAP R/3 is the former name of the enterprise resource planning software produced by SAP AG. It is an enterprise-wide information system designed to coordinate all the resources, information, and activities needed to complete business processes such as order fulfillment or billing.

SAP was founded in June 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung ("System Analysis and Program Development") by five former IBM engineers in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg (Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, and Claus Wellenreuther).

The acronym was later changed to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung ("Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing").

History of SAP R/3

The first version of SAP's flagship enterprise software was a financial Accounting system named R/1 called as YSR. This was replaced by R/2 at the end of the 1970s. SAP R/2was in a mainframe based business application software suite that was very successful in the 1980s and early 1990s. 

It was particularly popular with large multinational European companies who required soft-real-time business applications, with multi-currency and multi-language capabilities built in. With the advent of distributed client–server computing SAP AG brought out a client–server version of the software called SAP R/3 (The "R" was for "Real-time data processing" and 3 was for 3-tier). This new architecture is compatible with multiple platforms and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows or UNIX. This opened up SAP to a whole new customer base. SAP R/3 was officially launched on 6 July 1992. It was renamed SAP ERP and later again renamed ECC (Enterprise Core Component). 

SAP came to dominate the large business applications market over the next 10 years. SAP ECC 5.0 ERP is the successor of SAP R/3 4.70. The newest version of the suite is SAP ECC 6.0.

Different Releases Year Wise of SAP

1. SAP R/3 Release 1.0A Release Date 6 July 1992
2. SAP R/3 Release 2.0 / 2.1 Released 1993
3. SAP R/3 Release 3.0 / 3.1 Released 1995
4. SAP R/3 Release 4.0B Release Date June 1998
5. SAP R/3 Release 4.5B Release Date March 1999
6. SAP R/3 Release 4.6A Release Date 1999
7. SAP R/3 Release 4.6B Release Date Dec 1999
8. SAP R/3 Release 4.6C Release Date April 2001
9. SAP R/3 Enterprise Release 4.70 Release Date March- Dec 2003[2]
10. SAP R/3 Enterprise Edition 4.7
11. SAP R/3 Enterprise Central Component 5.0
12. SAP R/3 Enterprise Central Component 6.0
13. SAP ERP 6.0 - Enhancement Packages (1,2,3,4,5,6)