Over the last decades, SAP has shaped the market of enterprise applications, continuously delivering value to customers by transforming best industry practices and business processes into software. Software development for enterprise applications has become a core competency of SAP. The research field for enterprise software development is concerned with the adoption of new technologies, methods, and tools in SAP's engineering processes and solutions.

Major research areas in this field are:

• Model-driven software development – As a major trend in the software industry, model-driven software development is raising abstraction levels in the software development process through layered models. Several different flavors of model-based and model-driven software development methods, practices, and tools are in use in academia and industry. SAP Research is focusing on two main areas: providing base technology and modeling infrastructure that simplifies the instantiation of model-driven software development processes into everyday development projects, and applying domain-specific modeling approaches to specific areas in SAP's business process platform programming model
• Industrialization of software development – During the past decade, software production has begun a significant transformation, often referred to as the "industrialization of software development." Many innovations around industrialization of software development are resulting from software companies' need for increased productivity and address the internal software development processes. While product innovations still remain a main differentiator in the software industry, the importance of process innovations has been steadily increasing in recent years. SAP Research's research area for industrialization of software development addresses some of the challenges SAP faces in this transformation – with a strong focus on process innovation.
• Enterprise SOA and composite applications – Enterprise service-oriented architecture (Enterprise SOA), delivered with the business process platform (BPP), constitutes an industrialized software "product" (platform) providing the basis for mass-customizable products. Composite applications consuming enterprise services are the primary means to either extend existing products built on top of the BPP or to implement new solutions based on the BPP via reuse and composition. The research work carried out at SAP is looking at both: suitable mechanisms to extend the BPP, and simplified means to consume services provided by the platform from a developer and end-user perspective.
• Multicore and concurrent programming – New generations of CPUs will deliver more computing power through additional cores on a single chip without increasing the clock speed of the CPU. Such multicore processors create a new challenge for enterprise software by increasing the need for concurrent/parallel programming. This requires that enterprise applications with high computing demands have to be designed and implemented with a strong focus on exploiting inherent parallelism in order to achieve the needed throughput. SAP Research is working on evolutionary approaches to prepare SAP's technology stack underlying our business applications for this new paradigm. This covers all architectural levels that are subject to potential advances, from architectural styles and programming models to application servers and virtual machine infrastructures.
• Software quality – Software quality, as seen from a functional perspective, is of major concern to SAP since customers automate a significant part of their mission-critical business processes using our products. With enterprise infrastructures becoming more and more complex, there is an increasing demand to apply and extend suitable approaches and technologies in order to deliver high-quality products to our customers. Research topics in this area are, among others, model-based testing approaches, formal specification and verification of critical components, and static and dynamic software analysis tools.
• Security engineering – Security is one of the most important non-functional characteristics in enterprise applications with a lot of customer attention and high risks. Steadily improving the systematic approaches of engineering secure software is one major theme in this research field. SAP Research is working with several partners from industry and academia to join forces and share best practices and collaboratively research new and better approaches, methods, and tools that minimize security-related software defects.
• Mobility platforms – New hybrid client/server deployment models in the context of mobile devices and smart items based on embedded systems require the design of device-centric software platforms and the appropriate programming models for enterprise applications. SAP Research is working in two main areas: software platforms and enterprise application programming models for the upcoming generation of mobile devices and phones, and platforms and service-oriented architectures for embedded systems supporting the vision of an Internet of Things.