News Story

SAP Says Future Internet: Right Here, Right Now

John Domingue, Thursday 29 Apr 2010

Yesterday saw the end to the highly stimulating day and a half International Research Forum (IRF) hosted by SAP at the Lindner Hotel & Sporting Club Wiesensee. The annual invitation-only forum brings together the leading thinkers from academia and industry around a preselected topic and the theme of this year’s event was "Future Internet: Right Here, Right Now". The event was led by Lutz Heuser SAP Vice President for Research and was structured around visionary and challenge talks, panels and break out sessions. A significant SAP support team for the event incorporated several reporters, a press photographer, a film crew, live concept/mind mappers, sound recordists and professional moderators. Besides Lutz other notable attendees included: Claudia Alsdorf CEO of Original1 (a new cloud computing company created by SAP, Nokia and Giesecke & Devrient), Mario Campolargo Director of the Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures, Directorate of DG-INFSO, Martin Curley Director of Intel Labs Europe, Claudia Funke a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, Matthias Kaiserswerth Head of IBM Research Strategy in Systems Management and Compliance, Peter Kukrpick Chief Product Officer and Executive Board Member Software AG, Latif Ladid President of the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) Forum, Maximilian Metzger Director of Information and Communication Technologies, New Services at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Joachim Schaper Vice President at SAP Research and Wolfgang Wahlster head of DFKI (and also now head on the winning European Institute of Innovation and Technology Knowledge Innovation Community). For my part I was involved on a panel as a rapporteur on the topic of the technological foundations of the Future Internet which complemented the other forum topics of business models and possible inhibitors. IRF results are published in a book and we expect an associated Future Internet book to be published early in 2011. KMi will continue to work with SAP on their Unified Service Description Language which forms part of their vision for an Internet of Services.