The SAP of today is a different company to the one of five years ago. Where it was once an applications company it is now deeply embroiled in the middleware space, re-architecting in order to move to a service oriented architecture. It has also learnt a thing or two about marketing and communications, enabling it to better handle the introduction of new technologies and concepts such as NetWeaver and Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA).

"A few years ago people questioned what SAP was up to when it was talking about NetWeaver and platforms and architectures because it was outside the applications space," says Graham Kingsmill, UK MD.

Find out more about SAP's business model at http://www.commentwire.com.