The Advanced Enterprise Middleware Group is inventing new technologies in the dynamic and critically important field of middleware for supporting enterprise applications. Enterprise applications are industrial-scale, distributed, heterogeneous software systems with rigorous requirements for performance, scalability, fault tolerance, and extensibility. Middleware plays a crucial role in enterprise applications by integrating system components, allowing them to interoperate correctly and reliably, and facilitating system management and evolution. Designing, configuring and maintaining enterprise applications is an inherently complex task. Building and adapting these applications to implement a new or to change an existing business process, (to address a change in the IT infrastructure or a particular system state - e.g., heavy load, crash-) typically requires the intervention of highly skilled IT persons. The adaptation is often costly and time-consuming. This conflicts with the ever-increasing need for applications and business processes to be flexible, responsive and resilient.

Invention in this domain is at the intersection of several research fields from software engineering to distributed systems.

To that end we are working in the following areas:

• Performance, Scalability, Reliability
• Program Variability
• Separation of Concerns
• Service-Oriented Architectures
• Transaction Processing