The name SAP is acronym for Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing (in English) was founded by five former IBM employees in 1972.  One year later, the first financial accounting software, forming the basis for the continuous development was get completed, which later on was know as the "R/1 system. Here" "R" stands for real-time data processing. By the end of the decade, SAP R/2 came into world. SAP R/2 was a mainframe like DB/2 based business application software that was very successful in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was particularly popular with large multinational European companies who required soft-real-time business applications, with multi-currency and multi-language capabilities built in.

SAP R/3 a client-server version was officially launched on 6 July 1992 which was manageable on multiple platforms and operating systems, such as Linux, opened up SAP to a whole new customer base.

SAP R/3 is perhaps the best known ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system on the market. SAP R/3 is a client/server based 3-tiered application. It has

Presentation layer - interfaces with the user

Application layer - Have all the business-specific logic

Database layer - records and stores all the information about the system, including transactional and configuration data.