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Definition: SAP


(1) (SAP America, Inc., Newtown Square, PA) The U.S. branch of SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany, one of the largest software companies in Europe. SAP was founded in 1972 as Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing by five former engineers from IBM. SAP's R/2 mainframe and R/3 client/server business application suites were the flagship products for the company, catapulting the company into prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, under the banner of the SAP Business Suite, SAP is a leading vendor in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other business software.

In 2010, SAP acquired Sybase, maker of the popular Sybase database and related software. See SAP Business Suite, R/3 and Sybase.

(2) (Session Announcement Protocol) An IETF protocol for distributing session description messages to potential recipients. It is widely used to send SDP messages. See SIP.

(3) (Service Advertising Protocol) A NetWare protocol used to identify the services and addresses of servers attached to the network. The responses are used to update a table in the router known as the Server Information Table.

(4) (Secondary Audio Program) An NTSC audio channel used for auxiliary transmission, such as foreign language broadcasting or teletext.