OPC - OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) for Process Control :: The Industrial Interoperability Standard
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SAP was actually established in Mannheim, Germany in 1971 by five former IBM employees.
It was originally named in Germen as Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte which is translated in English as “System Applications and Products”.
In the beginning, the concept behind SAP was to provide custmers an ability to interact with common corporate database for a comprehensive range of application. With time, all those applications were assembled and SAP evolved. Now many organizations including major corporations such as Microsoft and IBM have integrated SAP in their business.
It has become world’s largest inter-enterprise software and world’s fourth-largest independent software supplier. As of January 2007, It is now publicly traded company with over 38,4000 employees in over 50 countries and more than 36,000 customers around the world.
SAP applications, built around their latest R/3 system, provide the capability to manage financial, asset, and cost accounting, production operations and materials, personnel, plants, and archived documents. The R/3 system runs on a number of platforms including Windows 2000 and uses the client/server model. The latest version of R/3 includes a comprehensive Internet-enabled package.
SAP has recently launched its product offerings under a comprehensive Web interface, called mySAP.com, and added new e-business applications, including customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM).