Basis is a set of programs and tools that act as an interface with Database, Operating system, Communication protocols and business applications (such as FI, CO, MM,etc). Full form of BASIS is “Business Application Software Integrated solution”

SAP applications such as FI,CO,PP etc. can run and communicate with each other across different Operating systems and Databases with the help of BASIS.

Nowadays Basis is known as Netweaver.

Alias of BASIS is SAP Application Server Technology and alias of NetWeaver is SAP Web Application Server.

After adding java stack (the applications which are developed in J2EE,BSP,JSP,etc..) enhanced security standard for business process. Both ABAP and Java stack can be monitored from one platform. Netweaver supports standard protocols such as HTTP,SMTP,XML,SOAP,SSO,WEBDAV,WSDL,WMLSSO,SSL,X.509 and Unicode format(representation of handling text).

We can say Basis is the operating system for SAP applications and ABAP. Basis provides services like communication with the operating system, database communication, memory management, runtime collection of application data, web requests, exchanging business data etc…

Basis supports a number of known operating systems (Unix flavors,Microsoft windows server edition, AS400,z/OS,etc) and databases (Oracle,DB2,Informix,Maxdb,Microsoft SQL Server,etc)..