What Did Sap Change? A Market Shaping Analysis

Abstract

The market for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software was analysed in the contexts of computer science, business models, sociology and history. However, the impact of SAP which has driven the ERP software market with its product innovation was not analysed in the framework of market shaping. Particularly, a new direction within marketing which aims to reconnect it to markets can be an interesting point of departure for the analysis since the way ERP software shaped the markets has similar impacts with the way internet shaped the markets. Using a framework based on three market shaping effects, the results suggested that SAP's impact was mainly on agency costs, transaction costs and network effects. These three points suggest a similarity to the market shaping impact of internet economics.