UK: PhD in Management in Virtual Environments

Company Overview:
SAP is the world’s largest inter-enterprise software company and the world’s third-largest independent software provider overall. SAP Research studies emerging IT trends and deploys new technologies in real-life environments to determine their potential business value for
SAP. Research Centres are situated in several locations worldwide. The SAP Research Centre in Belfast has a PhD position available in the area of the establishment and management of Virtual Environments. This research area is of very high industrial importance for SAP and will strengthen the leadership of SAP within the inter-enterprise market. As a result, the candidate will have excellent job opportunities.

PhD Program:
The PhD program at SAP Research offers you a great chance to get industry experience in a real-life project, to work with top researchers from all over the world, and to have the opportunity to develop your own research network. As SAP Research is a consortium member in various partly government funded projects, it forms an ideal platform for working on a doctoral thesis in conjunction with university partners. After finishing your PhD, you will normally
encounter very attractive job opportunities within SAP.

As a PhD candidate you will be employed by SAP on a 3 year contract during which time it is expected that you complete the submission of your PhD thesis. The salary will be similar to university-based PhD studentships and tuition fees will be paid by SAP. You will be based
primarily at the SAP Research Centre in Belfast, participating in a SAP research project that is closely aligned to your PhD topic. You will also participate in the standard activities of full-time PhD students at Queen’s University Belfast including attending supervisor meetings, seminars and other training workshops.

Research Topic:
Businesses in future service-oriented economies need to act in a more agile fashion than ever before. Therefore, business to business interaction must become as dynamic as possible in order to deliver the requested services. This directly leads to the concept of Virtual Management in which it should be possible to dynamically and frequently assign resources (physical or virtual) to services within short periods of time. The life time of such dynamic environments can be in the range of minutes. Consequently, new mechanisms to establish and control such dynamic environments are needed. In particular, the following topics must be addressed:

• Systematic analysis of state-of-the-art dynamic business
  situations in real production environments,
• A detailed analysis of the construction of dynamic environments
  in various layers,
• The study of different possibilities and corresponding
  constraints to form and destroy dynamic execution environments,
• Investigation of the dependencies between general management of
  dynamic compute environments and data management.

Student Pre-requisites
Potential PhD students will be expected to have a First Class honours degree, or equivalent, in Computer Science or a closely related discipline with a broad appreciation of the research topics described above. Candidates will also be expected to have very strong capabilities in self-organisation and the ability to work in an international team of researchers.

How to apply:
Please apply by sending your CV and transcripts (official examinations results) to: research.belfast@sap.com, refer to: job post PhD Virtual Environments. Please also indicate that you saw the job posting on this website. Further information: www.sap.com/research and
www.sap.com/research/phd