SAP Research is the global technology research unit of SAP AG. The group significantly contributes to SAP's product portfolio and extends its leading position in the market by identifying and shaping emerging IT trends and generating breakthrough technologies through applied research.
In contrast to SAP’s product groups and development labs that work on new functions and releases, the researchers explore opportunities that haven’t yet been developed into products.
SAP Research spreads its research and development activities around the globe. Currently, their thriving network comprises of 15 centers worldwide, their headquarters in Walldorf, and numerous partners from the business and academic worlds. (Additional information is available at www.sap.com/research.)
CVs of key persons
Thomas Michael Bohnert is a senior research scientist at SAP Research Center Zurich. He is responsible for the research competence centre Network of the Future (NoF) where he works on topics such as Future Internet Architectures (FIA), Convergence of Next Generation Networks (NGN) and Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Besides he leads and conducts research on Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Backend (V2B) integration, and architectures for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Thomas was and is involved in various national and international research projects, e.g. FP6 IP WEIRD, FP6 NoE E-NEXT, CELTIC 100GET, ESF COST 290. His 10 plus years of industrial experience range from SAP over NEC, VTT and SIEMENS to his own IT consultancy named BNCS. He is a member of the eMobility ETP Steering Board and serves as Regional Correspondent (Europe) for the IEEE Communications Magazine News Section. His works have been published in several books, journals, and conferences. He remains involved in academia as chair and TPC member of international conferences.
Dr. Marc Brogle joined the SAP Research Center Zurich in 2010 where he works as senior researcher in the area of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) research topics. He holds a PhD and Master degree in Computer Science from the University of Bern, Switzerland. During his time at the university, he has been performing research on networking related topics at the Computer Networks and Distributed Systems group (CNDS) in the Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (IAM). Marc has been working in the EU FP6 IP EUQoS research project and is a member of the ERCIM eMobility WG. He is currently also involved in the FP7 STREP ELVIRE focusing on electrical vehicles research. Before pursuing his academic and researcher career, he was working for many years in various fields of network & system administration as well as designing and developing distributed applications & systems.
Dr. Marc Brogle left SAP at the end of 2011.
Philip Robinson is a researcher at SAP Research Center Belfast, where new execution environments and approaches to effective management of SAP systems in these environments are being investigated. Philip is currently exploring methods for modeling, visualization and deployment management of service oriented software and infrastructures, with a focus on security aspects. He has authored and coauthored several publications in the area of security engineering, and has completed a doctoral thesis on manageability-centric security engineering. His research addressed the challenges of designing manageable security architectures for modern, dynamic application infrastructures such as mobile computing, ubiquitous computing and virtual organizations. He has recently been leading the security analysis and evaluation work in the XtreemOS project, and now investigates the viability, opportunities and risks of deploying SAP systems on dynamic network infrastructure, as developed in the GEYSERS project.
Luuk van Laarhoven started in September 2010 at SAP Research Center Zurich where he will work as an intern for a period of six months. Aside, he is also finishing his M.Sc. study of Information Management at the University of Tilburg (UvT) in the Netherlands. Before his period at SAP and the UvT, he completed his B.Sc degree in Communication Systems at the Hogeschool Utrecht (University of Applied Science), also in the Netherlands. Besides his study activities, he worked part-time at the Dutch insurance company Interpolis for a period of two years and another five years as a test-analyst at the headquarters of the Rabobank in Eindhoven (NL). At SAP Research, he is currently contributing to GEYSERS research project focusing on Workpackages WP1 and WP5 with regards to the use cases, business models, requirements and test-beds.
Alexandru-Florian Antonescu is an associate researcher at SAP Research Center Zurich, joining SAP on April 2010 as a working student. He developed a mobile Android application using REST services, GPS and multimedia features and a J2EE application using JSF, Hibernate, Spring and Google Maps for the SensorCIP transfer project, also participating in the Sensei project. Aside, he has studied Computer Science at University "Politehnica" of Bucharest, Romania and previously worked at S&T Romania for two years, developing J2EE business applications. He is currently working on his master thesis, participating in the GEYSERS project (WP2 and WP3) and preparing for a PhD at University of Bern in collaboration with SAP Research Zurich.
Barry McLarnon is a Research Associate at SAP Research Center Belfast, and has worked there since August 2008, after obtaining an MEng Computer Science degree from Queen’s University Belfast. His responsibilities include research and development in the area of automated system management of large-scale applications and environments, which involves building and maintaining a pluggable architecture for monitoring and controlling the system landscape. He was previously a member of the XtreemOS project, where his tasks included supporting the project deliverables by testing the latest OS builds and appraising their suitability for SAP applications. He is also doing a PhD on the topic of reliability of automated system management solutions, which began in April 2009.
Alessandro Manfredi is a master student in Computer Science Engineering at Roma Tre University. He is currently working on his master thesis at SAP Research Center Zurich since October 2010. He completed his bachelor's degree in 2008 and beside his studies, in the last years has been active in the local Linux Users Group and participated in several workshops on business start-up enterprises. His interests and technical background focus on IT systems engineering, security, networking and scalable software architectures. His contribution to the GEYSERS project will be focused on WP2 and WP4.
Alexandros Andronikakis is a master student in the Department of Management, Technology and Economics at ETH Zurich. He has obtained a diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens with a specialization in Telecommunications and IT Systems. He is currently doing his internship at SAP Research in Zurich (since March 2011) and his contribution to the GEYSERS project will primarily focus on WP2 and WP5. He has experience in Android application development and web programming and has participated in the technical evaluation of various IT projects. His interests include cloud computing, new IT architectures and novel business models.
Matthias Thoma is a Research Associate at SAP Research Zurich, and has worked there since March 2011. He holds a diploma (masters degree) in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He is currently mainly involved in WP4 activities. He previously worked for the Research Center for Information Technolgies and BMW Car IT.
Contact Us