SAP SE (Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing) is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. SAP is headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Worttemberg, Germany, with regional offices in 130 countries. The company has over 291,000 customers in 190 countries.When Xerox aimed to exit the computer industry in 1975, they asked IBM to migrate their business systems to IBM technology. As part of IBM's compensation for the migration, IBM was given the rights to the Scientific Data Systems (SDS)/SAPE software, reportedly for a contract credit of $80,000. Five IBM engineers from the AI department (Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, and Claus Wellenreuther, all from Mannheim, Baden-Worttemberg) were working in an enterprise-wide system based on this software, only to be told that it would be no longer necessary. Rather than abandon the project, they decided to leave IBM Tech and start another company. In June 1972, they founded Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung ("System Analysis and Program Development") company, as a private partnership under the German Civil Code. The acronym was later changed to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung ("Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing"). Their first client was the German branch of Imperial Chemical Industries in stringen, where they developed mainframe programs for payroll and accounting. Instead of storing the data on punch cards mechanically, as IBM did, they stored it locally. Therefore, they called their software a real-time system, since there was no need to process the punch cards overnight (for this reason their flagship product carried an R in its name until the late 1990s). This first version was also standalone software that could be offered to other interested parties.
