Business grids are envisioned as a service-oriented utility infrastructure for running adaptive enterprise applications in a dependable, efficient, and transparent way. They will become the general ICT backbone in future economies. The adoption of business grids is expected to happen in three steps: first, as the ICT backbone within enterprises; second, as a basis for hosting scenarios; and, ultimately, as the general ICT-infrastructure for service-oriented economies.

Our mission is to investigate in and combine grid, utility, enterprise computing with model driven software engineering and advanced IT management approaches to run service-oriented architectures on system infrastructures with increased flexibility, dependable quality of service, and minimized TCO. Therefore, we focus on the following major research tracks:

• Performance engineering – Explore performance models for service-oriented architectures and adaptive infrastructures. Models shall support the prediction of performance behavior and resource consumption in different situations; namely, different configuration, service usage, and internal system state.
• Data grids – Investigate how to improve scalability and responsiveness of traditionally centralized databases in adaptive and mass hosting environments.
• Virtualization – Determine the best exploitation of emerging virtualization technologies, such as eScience-Grid systems or virtual machines, in order to realize more adaptive infrastructures.
• Business-driven security – Develop security enforcement and management approaches that ensure protection and availability of data, applications, and infrastructure according to well-specified business needs.
• Model-driven system management – Determine utmost automation of business systems' operation, in particular for mass hosting scenarios.
• Multicore – Explore usage and exploitation of multicore architectures in the context of advanced business applications.
• Software engineering for business grids – Investigate enhanced engineering methods that leverage model-driven technologies for preparing applications to run in a business grid in an optimal manner.