Features

Garth Ridgway, NTT

SAP was founded in 1972 by five former IBM employees. In a publicity shot from the time, they’re posed around a table in a nondescript office, all holding pens and hunched over a large blueprint. The hair is bouffant, the suits dark, and no one is smiling. These are clearly men who take their jobs very seriously. 

As the story goes, Xerox wanted its systems migrated to IBM, and the latter firm put five engineers on the project, who all worked in Mannheim, Germany. The project ground to a halt for reasons unclear, but the five had seen the gap in the market, and left to form their company, which they called Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung, or System Analysis and Programme Development. It has been a long haul since the ‘70s, with the company constantly tinkering with its solutions while persuading many of the world’s largest firms that they can run their businesses better with its suite of solutions.