As a piece of ter­mi­nol­o­gy, SAP doesn’t offi­cial­ly use the label ​“satel­lite” to refer to the small­er brands that now sit under the moth­er­ship umbrel­la. Indeed, the com­pa­ny would prob­a­bly think the term dis­parag­ing as it in some way infers a low­er-league sta­tus for sub-busi­ness­es staffed by employ­ees who all are val­ued equally.

We Care a Lot

Many of the small­er play­ers in the total SAP orches­tra are by no means small in the big pic­ture, that is — they go toward build­ing the total offer­ing that SAP goes to mar­ket with day in and day out. Many of the com­po­nent part SAP divi­sions come from acqui­si­tions, inter­nal­ly devel­oped ini­tia­tives, or as pieces of (still use­ful) lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy that might remind us of a time when SAP was ​”just” an ERP com­pa­ny. Remem­ber, lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy is tech­nol­o­gy that still works, that’s why it’s still around.

A to Z of SAP

We know that SAP often tells us that it runs the ship with an oper­a­tional base focused on 25 indus­try ver­ti­cals into 12 lines of busi­ness across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid deploy­ments. But it’s hard­er to find out how many brands exist under the hood because the firm prefers to remind us of fig­ures like the one not­ing that 76% of the world’s trans­ac­tion rev­enues run on an SAP system.

In search of a break­down then, the SAP A‑Z prod­ucts web­site fea­tures some 548 men­tions of the let­ters SAP on the page. Each entry men­tions the name SAP in the title and at least once in the body copy of the link on offer. So then, halve 548 and round it down for pru­dence and we can prob­a­bly safe­ly say that SAP has more than 200 prod­uct offer­ings — some of them relat­ed brand divi­sions, some of them entire busi­ness units.

While we don’t need to remind you that SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, SAP Ari­ba, SAP Fiori, SAP Busi­nes­sOb­jects, SAP Lumi­ra, SAP Hybris, or SAP NetWeaver all exist as big hit­ters around the SAP fam­i­ly din­ner table, there are plen­ty of small­er names that the casu­al SAP enthu­si­ast could arguably spend an enjoy­able after­noon get­ting to know.

Satel­lite Smörgåsbord

Why, for exam­ple, are most of us not famil­iar enough with SAP Plant Con­nec­tiv­i­ty as a key Indus­tri­al Inter­net of Things (IIoT) brand from the SAP satel­lite smörgås­bord? Is there any rea­son why we haven’t thought about SAP Rur­al Sourc­ing Man­age­ment as a star play­er in the trace­able agri­cul­ture sup­ply chain mar­ket? How about SAP Tal­ent Vizual­iza­tion for strate­gic career devel­op­ment ini­tia­tives, did we miss that one too? We could keep going here, SAP Pow­erDe­sign­er for rapid data mod­el­ling jobs, a tool with its her­itage in the Sybase acqui­si­tion. It’s worth click­ing the first link in this sto­ry (the A‑Z of prod­ucts) just for a tour of the prod­uct groups.

We know that the big hit­ters make their own head­lines and some even host ded­i­cat­ed con­fer­ences and events. But while some of the small­er bod­ies will remain most­ly silent through­out the year, some divi­sions will mount their own press com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­grams. As a per­fect exam­ple, SAP Con­cur is the firm’s expense, trav­el, and invoice man­age­ment solu­tions. Acquired back in 2014, the SAP Con­cur team has in Jan­u­ary 2018 already detailed its work to dri­ve deep­er inte­gra­tion into the core SAP brand.

Gen­der-Neu­tral Siblings

In sum­ma­ry then, these satel­lite brands are not less­er ele­ments in any sense. Yes, SAP Leonar­do and SAP HANA will con­tin­ue to steal the lime­light in 2018, but these less­er known ele­ments of the total SAP stack should not be clas­si­fied as diminu­tive off­spring to the moth­er­ship. Rather then, they should be regard­ed as sib­ling brands to the com­plete SAP tech­nol­o­gy proposition.

While some firms active­ly and aggres­sive­ly acquire (Ora­cle) and oth­ers find them­selves hav­ing to divest cor­po­rate pur­chas­es and splin­ter off major divi­sions (Hewlett Packard Enter­prise), SAP has arguably been more con­sid­ered, more strate­gic, more Ger­man­ic per­haps in its work to build the uni­verse accord­ing to its own ver­sion of intel­li­gent design. 

After all, satel­lites need a celes­tial object to grav­i­tate toward. Sure­ly SAP sees itself as the shin­ing light at the cen­ter of the enter­prise soft­ware solar system.