No company has come to better represent the idea of enterprise applications than SAP AG headquartered in Walldorf, Germany. Today, more than 20,000 companies run more than 64,500 installations of SAP software for their back-office infrastructure. The lion's share of those installations are SAP's R/2 and R/3 ERP systems. When big companies talk about integrating applications today, there is usually an SAP application in there somewhere.
When client/server computing began to flourish in the 1990s, and international organizations looked for financial software suites, SAP successfully moved its former mainframe application software forward. Like others, the firm has had to make adjustments since then -- supporting a number of databases, finding better ways to link to legacy computer systems, linking up with Java servers and embracing so-called Web services architectures.
While SAP applications have long been known for being mission-critical, they are also known for being rigid, complex and tightly coupled. So notoriously proprietary was the company's software, and so arcane its ABAP programming language, that a cottage industry of consultants sprang up to customize, fine-tune and upgrade SAP applications.
While overall company revenue has risen from euro 5.1B in 1999 to euro 7.0B in 2003, software license revenue declined in 2003. The drop was somewhat offset by increases in maintenance revenue, yet the mantra in the IT world today calls for reduced maintenance charges. Like others, SAP is working to create more flexible software and to exploit open-source and XML-based Web services software to make that happen. At the same time, the company hopes to shed its inflexible software image, and to expand into the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) markets.
Why such a Big Blog, what is the reason behind this.. on the way .. Check out my next blog on Monday
1 comment:
Sir, SAP labs-la velai kidaichudutha ?
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