If you are an IT student, you may wonder what are the key applications of the future. By choosing to extend your knowledge in the field of SAP, you will multiply your chance of securing a job at the end of your studies. If you are not convinced yet, these are some of the key reasons why SAP is one of the most successful IT companies in the world.

Five ex-IBM engineers created the company in Germany in 1972. In case you’re ever asked, SAP stands for Systeme, Andwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung which - translated to English - means Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing.

30 years later, SAP has subsidiaries in over 50 countries around the world from America to Japan (and pretty much everything in between). The original five founders had such a successful product, that they have become the third largest software maker in the world, with over 17,500 customers (including more than half of the world's 500 top companies).

So what made this company so successful? For years SAP stayed within the German borders until it had penetrated every large German company. Towards the end of the 80's, client-server architecture became popular and SAP responded with the release of SAP R/3 (in 1992). This turned out to be a killer app for SAP, especially in the North American region into which SAP expanded in 1988.

If you wonder what kind of SAP job’s opportunities are available, it is important to note that SAP alone employs over 27,000 people world-wide today. The company had revenues of $7.34 billion and Net Income of $581 million in FY01. There are now 44,500 installations of SAP, in 120 countries, with more then 10 million users! Therefore wherever you live in the world, you will always find an opportunity to continue your SAP career. Nowadays, SAP are maintaining and increasing their dominance over their competitors through a combination of embracing the internet with mySAP.com, extending their solutions with CRM to head off Siebel and adding functionality to their industry solutions.

SAP also comes in 21 industry-specific versions, which means that being a SAP specialist will enable you to choose your favourite industry to work in. You will also to have the opportunity to work for some of the most prestigious multinationals such as Orange, T-Mobile and Nestlé, just to name a few of them, which advertise their SAP jobs on www.thesapjobboard.com.

On the top of that SAP is really involved in student’s programmes, in order to renew constantly their base of SAP specialists. The SAP University Alliances program was established in Germany in 1988. Today, the global program has nearly 800 universities participating world-wide. Annually, more than 150,000 students are enrolled in courses supported by SAP software.

Recently the German giant rewarded ten undergraduate students with $10,000 Scholarships. SAP America Inc., a subsidiary of SAP AG offers annual scholarship program, which helps discover and empower talented undergraduates who exhibit the capabilities of future business leaders. In conjunction with the SAP(R) University Alliances program and SAP's corporate citizenship program, the highly competitive scholarship encourages students to think innovatively and apply business technology concepts to solve industry challenges through research. Designed for undergraduate students studying business, computer science, mathematics or engineering, the scholarship program from SAP evaluates applicants based on their familiarity with and understanding of business technology.

As a global leader in business and IT innovation, SAP is already taking public leadership in numerous corporate social responsibility initiatives and is clearly committed to IT Innovation and Education.