Welcome to James Rushmore's SAP WORLD, an introduction to the world of SAP Enterprise Software.  SAP is an exciting and dynamic business environment and at James Rushmore Ltd we have been privileged to watch the product go from strength to strength. With new releases, new modules and new technologies regularly released, SAP is now one of the most dominant and effective systems available on the market today. James Rushmore Ltd's SAP World web site enables you to get to the core facts about one of the world's top software systems.

In SAP WORLD you will find:

• An archive of Articles and links relating to SAP, Enterprise Software, Employment, and many other relevant topics.
• Links to some of the web's best SAP sites, where you can browse until your heart is content through SAP's site, newsgroups, case studies, information sites, and directories.
• And of course no link page is complete without some valuable Interest Links!

SAP HISTORY

SAP was born in 1972 in Germany by five former IBM employees. Within five years the company employed twenty five staff and achieved sales of almost DM 4 million. In 1979 a new mainframe computer version of SAP software, named R/2, was released in Germany and just three years later, after only ten years trading, SAP had 236 customers. 

By 1992, when SAP released the Client-Server version, branded R/3, the SAP product was well established as an integrated, business wide answer to the disparate systems of earlier generations.  SAP R/3 is a comprehensive and continually developing suite of client server business applications that combines all of the activities within a company into a single, integrated software solution.  The R/3 System supports enterprise-wide financial and controlling, sales and distribution, materials management, production planning, quality management, plant maintenance, human resources, and many other specialist functions. Not surprisingly, SAP R/3 took the world by storm!  In the first four years of R/3 the number of SAP R/3 installations grew dramatically from just 100 in 1992 to more than 9,000 by the end of 1996 representing more than $2.3 billion revenue and $365 million net profit!  SAP had become the world leader in client/server applications, with well over 30% of the market.  The company had achieved major Fortune 500 penetration, with SAP solutions being used by

• all the world’s top 10 chemical companies, 
• 7 of the world’s top 10 petroleum companies, 
• 7 of the world’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies, 
• 7 of the world’s top 8 computer companies, 
• and 9 of the world’s 10 most profitable companies!

As one might expect with a market-leading vendor, SAP has continued to evolve. The advent of the MySAP web enabled solutions and related acquisitions in the web development, portal and integration markets moved the company into new and exciting territory. Today SAP has some 18,800 customers and over 28,000 staff worldwide.