Have you ever used SAP? Many, many businesses do, but for those of us outside of the SAP specialist world, it can seem like something of a mysterious art – a massive sphere of modules all carefully designed for doing specific things in a complex enterprise environment.
When consumers interact with portals or eCommerce sites driven by SAP, like the ones developed by weave ability, they do not necessarily need to consider the SAP platform or indeed brand itself. Even though SAP is there at the heart of it all and is 100% business critical, they don’t often have much of a picture of what SAP’s identity is as they don’t necessarily work with its software or hardware products day in day out unlike other major IT brands like Microsoft, IBM and HP. Here then, are three interesting facts about SAP to help you get to know this software giant a little better:
SAP is Germany’s Third Most Valuable Brand
In case you weren’t aware, SAP comes from Germany. In fact, if you start working with its code, you’ll even find that a lot of the things in there like variable names are actually written in German! While in 2014 SAP became officially a European concern, becoming SAP SE, the brand is very much German, and is the third most valuable brand to come out of Germany – the first being Mercedes-Benz and the second BMW. This of course means that it is the most valuable non-automotive German brand.
SAP Is Europe’s Largest Software Brand
SAP may not be able to steal the top spot for German brands from the car makers, but in the software world, it is literally the biggest thing to come out of the whole of Europe. It is the fourth biggest software brand in the world, however since those ahead of it, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM respectively, are all American concerns, SAP leads Europe. Interestingly, the rest of the global top ten also only features US brands, like HP, VMWare and EMC leaving SAP way out in front of all other European software companies.
SAP Customers Are Involved in Everything We Do!
SAP products are used in 190 countries, by around 300,000 businesses. While it is mainly thought of as something for large companies with complicated operations, in actual fact over 80% of businesses who use SAP products are in the SME category. This doesn’t mean that the image of SAP being used in major corporations is false, however – 98% of the most valued brands are SAP customers, along with 87% of the Forbes Global 2000. What this means is that somewhere along the line, SAP is touching our lives all of the time. 78% of the food in the world is produced by companies big and small who use SAP. It is estimated that 74% of the transaction revenue in the world touches a SAP system.
As you can see from these facts, SAP is a very, very big deal and while it may not be as ‘in our faces’ as brands like Microsoft in terms of how it affects our lives, it has given us a genuinely crucial set of products.
