Market-driven innovation
The research and development department was further aligned to the market. New product and solution developments are now increasingly market-driven. Proven, field-tested solutions are developed into globally relevant applications, and integrated into the overall Software AG portfolio.

This development process ensures consistent market orientation. Specific characteristics of regional and vertical markets can be fully incorporated. This significantly reduces the time to market, therefore strengthening the competitive position of Software AG.

Progress through R&D
Enterprise Information Integrator (EII) is amongst the key innovate products and solutions of the past business year. Software AG developed it from a package which initially met the requirements of American customers asking for Single View technology. It offers one-stop access to distributed data stored on different systems. In 2004, the technology was expanded into a generally usable package.

Further product developments include Replication and ISF. Replication was also created to meet customers' demands. In this case, to be able to automatically transmit changes to a data record to identical data records on servers all over the world. Therefore customers can access real-time data records anywhere within the network. ISF is an e-government-solution, allowing public authorities to provide online services for citizens in order to independently handle administrative processes. Originally developed in England, this solution is currently being implemented in the German city of Giessen.

High-potential cooperation
To optimize their products, Software AG entered a technology partnership with Ontoprise GmbH in 2004, focusing on the semantic interpretation of company data within a single view.

R&D locations world-wide
To ensure that its solutions and packages are always state-of-the-art, Software AG invested 16.5 percent of its licensing and maintenance revenue in research and development. With this percentage, Software AG reaches IT industry Best Practice investment level. In five countries, 348 employees are working on innovative products which anticipate and meet customers' requirements.

R&D awards
Readers of the US magazines XML Journal and Web Services Journal ranked Software AG products first in 14 out of 23 categories. In Switzerland, we integrated the central database solution of the Swiss Federal Roads Authority with all peripheral and heterogeneous solutions used by the road traffic departments of the different Cantons. By using EntireX, the applications used in the road traffic departments, based on various operating system platforms, were seamlessly connected to the central register of driving licenses in Bern. This facilitated a smooth bi-directional data flow. For this solution, Business Integration Journal awarded Software AG the title of runner-up for the best EAI solution.