What Does SAP Stand For

One Man’s Wacky Search to Find the Truth Behind the Acronym

by Jon Reed

It’s a question that haunts me. You see, people are troubled by acronyms they don’t understand. Whether they need to know the answer is not relevant; their troubles will continue until their brains have a satisfactory definition. To this day, receive frequent emails asking me to explain what SAP stands for. I guess I should be grateful for email; if it didn’t exist, I’d get phone calls instead. The calls would go the same way, with me trying to decide whether to blurt out: “Don’t say ‘sap’, say ‘S’ ‘A’ ‘P’.”

The most common member of the “what does SAP stand for” gang is the “I’m new to SAP” person, or, more accurately, the “I want to be new to SAP” person. Mean recruiters call these folks “wannabes”, but only because companies won’t pay recruiting fees for them anymore. Back in the mid-90s, nobody was mocked as a “wannabe.” Everyone who had the word SAP on their resume was worth a $25,000 recruiting fee, whether they knew what SAP stood for or not. And if they had seen a live instance and configured a couple of screens, they could be as “sappy” as they wanted.

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