Enterprise resource leader, SAP founded in 1972, is facing the slow death of traditional on-premise ERP. Customers with shrinking IT budgets are opting to outsource more of their core business systems. Meanwhile, web companies are offering to run business processes and applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), human resources (HR) and business intelligence (BI) over the internet.Once the kingpin of monolithic supply chain installations, SAP now faces competition from all sides. It comes from arch-rivals like Oracle and IBM to web pure-plays offering on-demand computing for a massive range of business applications.SAP’s answer is to embrace cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and offer new BI and mobile computing technology. It is striving to improve the usability of its software and to listen harder to its customers. As part of its fight-back, SAP has overhauled its executive team, made two big strategic acquisitions, and focused once more on its massive installed base of more than 100,000 customers.