Brief History of SAP
SAP was started in 1972 by five former IBM employees with a vision of creating a standard application software for real-time business processing. SAP stands for Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing. Since its inception SAP has issued several releases, such as SAP R/1, SAP R/2, and SAP R/3. The R in these releases stands for “Real-Time” data processing. The 3 in the R/3 stands for three-tier client-server architecture. The most current release of SAP is SAP Business Suite 7.
Table 1-1 lists the major SAP releases and the release year.
![images](/api/v2/epubs/9780071663489/files/t0004-01.jpg)
TABLE 1-1 Major SAP Releases
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