German enterprise software company, one of the world's largest providers of business software including ERP, CRM, and enterprise data management solutions.
SAP signed a new agreement with the General Services Administration to offer federal agencies access to its database, cloud, and analytics services at significantly discounted rates of up to 80%. This expanded SAP's relationship with the US federal government under the Trump administration.
SAP announced it would cut several diversity programs to comply with US requirements under Trump administration. Changes include eliminating female leadership quotas in the US, removing gender diversity from executive compensation metrics, merging the D&I department with corporate social responsibility, and dropping the target of 40% female employees. The move followed letters from the US embassy to German businesses.
On June 26, 2024, SAP published an official Open Source Manifesto, publicly committing to sustained investment in open-source development. SAP holds founding and/or platinum-level membership in the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Cloud Foundry Foundation, Continuous Delivery Foundation, and OpenAPI Initiative, plus Silver membership in the Apache Software Foundation, and is a major contributor to OpenJDK. SAP maintains multiple actively-used open-source projects including Gardener (Kubernetes-based cluster management, a CNCF project), GardenLinux, OpenUI5 (its web application framework, Apache-2.0 licensed since 2013, ~270 GitHub contributors), Open Resource Discovery, and Open Component Model. In December 2023 SAP also open-sourced its previously proprietary SAP Cloud SDK for Java under Apache-2.0. Per the third-party Open Source Contributor Index (OSCI), which measures active GitHub contributors by company email domain, SAP has ranked among the largest commercial contributors to open source for several years running.
SAP announced restructuring affecting 8,000-10,000 positions under its 'Next Level Transformation' program, investing nearly €1B in AI as justification. The European Works Council accused SAP of using the program as a 'euphemism' for layoffs, stating management 'did not adequately justify the business logic.' 4,100 jobs affected in Europe including 2,600 in Germany. Employee engagement index target was lowered from 76-80% to 70-74%. By April 2025, only 3,000 had departed and SAP paused further cuts.
SAP agreed to pay over $220 million to the DOJ and SEC to resolve allegations that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by making improper payments to government officials in South Africa and Indonesia between 2013-2018. The settlement included a criminal penalty of $118.8M and administrative forfeiture of over $103M. Bribes included cash payments, political contributions, and luxury goods.
SAP reported achieving carbon neutrality across its own operations (Scope 1, Scope 2, and selected Scope 3 categories including business flights, employee commuting, and external data centers) for 2023, meeting a goal it had publicly set in 2021. The result was independently audited by BDO AG with limited assurance under ISAE 3000 and disclosed in SAP's audited Integrated/Annual Report. Building on this, SAP subsequently set a new near-term target -- validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) as consistent with the 1.5°C Paris Agreement pathway -- to cut gross Scope 1+2+3 greenhouse gas emissions by at least 90% by 2030 versus a 2023 baseline (from 6.9 million to 0.7 million metric tons CO2e), neutralizing at most the remaining 10% via carbon removals. SAP was also the first German company to receive SBTi certification, in 2017.
In 2011 SAP's Executive Board publicly pledged to raise the share of women in leadership (management) positions globally from an 18% baseline to 25% by the end of 2017, and committed to a further 1%-per-year increase thereafter (28% by 2020, 30% by 2022). SAP met the 2017 goal, reporting 25.4% women in management at year-end 2017, as documented in its audited 2017 Integrated Report and an SEC exhibit filing. In connection with the effort SAP also became the first multinational technology company to receive worldwide EDGE (Economic Dividends for Gender Equality) gender-equality certification in September 2016 (having been the first U.S. tech company to receive EDGE certification in January 2016), conducted a proactive pay-equity analysis of its U.S. workforce with corrective 'make-up' raises, and appointed two women (Jennifer Morgan and Adaire Fox-Martin) to its Executive Board in 2017. This is a distinct, earlier program from the 40%-female-employee-representation target that SAP dropped in its May 2025 DEI rollback.