ABSTRACT
SAP has become the preeminent vendor of standard business applications software. Throughout the last decade, it has reported sales and prot growth rates in excess of 40% every year. The sales for 2009 were reported to be $10 billion. As reported by SAP, there are more than 36,000 customers with more than 100,000 installations of SAP across the world. And, worldwide, more than seven million users work on SAP systems. By any standards, these are impressive numbers coming from a company that has a great vision and is destined to play a signicant role even in the Internet-driven markets of this century as well. SAP’s main product is SAP Business Suite. Throughout this book, we will refer to SAP as a company as well as its enterprise products by the same term SAP. This should not lead to any confusion because, at any point, the context would make it clear which meaning is intended.
