SAP Research Belfast was founded in January 2005 as part of SAP (UK) Limited and with support from InvestNI. It is embedded in an advanced research environment, including local universities Queens University Belfast and University of Ulster (UoU), and Northern Ireland Science Park (NISP). The ongoing support from InvestNI has enabled the lab to grow in size and diversity from its initial team of four people to 45 people today. The support from InvestNI has enabled SAP Research to carry out research in the areas of performance engineering, virtualization, natural language processing, smart energy systems, and future computing architectures. For all these technology areas, InvestNI helped reduce the research investment risk by providing financial support to grow the initial concept.
The Belfast location participates in two distinct, yet complementary, research topics: Business Intelligence and Technology Infrastructure. The Business Intelligence team stresses compute platforms beyond what they can currently provide in an effort to bring information and decision making into the hands of c-level management. The Belfast researchers are particularly interested in extracting meaning from unstructured and semi-structured text contained in large, complex, and interrelated documents; real-time analytics and mining on business processes; and analytics for business continuity management. The Technology Infrastructure team supports this by providing the next-generation compute platforms enabling the types of analysis required by the Business Intelligence team. A few of the key areas the Belfast team is focusing on are performance engineering, virtualization, and systems management.
Research Environment – Working with World-Class Researchers
The work associated with the Belfast office has motivated close links with Intel and HP, with regard to developing complementary expertise in the area of compute platforms.
The lab has close links to Intel Labs Europe, based in Leixlip. As a result of the close relationship, Intel and SAP have jointly invested into a partnership (CoLab) with the SAP office in Belfast to jointly work on research related to future compute platforms and smart energy, a high-data volume use case motivating the requirement for next generation compute platforms. In addition to the work of the CoLab, SAP and Intel have close collaborations in the area of business-driven IT management through our partnership in IVI (Innovation Value Institute) and also in the area of long-term archive of compute environments.
The HP partnership revolves around a joint interest to develop and improve the manageability of applications within an IT environment. Currently, the joint work focuses around the utilization of HP Cell technology to provide a dynamic compute infrastructure for the deployment of complete IT landscapes for testing environments.
Learn more about SAP's research collaborations in Belfast: