Helsinki, Beijing, and Vancouver in the previous years, Adelaide next year, and this year? Ulm! More than 150 experts from over 25 countries will travel to Ulm between 1st and 5th September 2014 in order to attend the 
18th International IEEE EDOC Conference.
Regardless of whether an industrial company, a service provider or the public sector – every organization has to embrace state-of-the-art information and communication technology (ICT) to run its business successfully these days. In this context, Enterprise Computing comprises all information systems that ensure the smooth operation of intra- and inter-organizational business processes. Thereby, information-processing technologies come into play as well as methodologies and efficient approaches to develop and run those technologies.
The EDOC conference series provide the key forum for researchers, decision makers, enterprise architects, solution designers, and practitioners in the field of Enterprise Computing. The world's largest association of technical professionals IEEE has been sponsoring the series since its foundation in 1997. “We are regarded as one of the top research groups in the field of Enterprise Computing. So, bringing this international top conference to Ulm was a logical step at the end,” 
Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert, designated director of the Institute of Databases and Information Systems, said.
This year’s EDOC conference in Ulm focuses on a late-breaking topic that even companies in the local area have to deal with in upcoming decades: the rapidly growing information overload in the information age as well as its implications on business processes, products and services. “Big Data will affect companies as much as the Internet did at end of 1990s. A direct and fast access to huge amounts of data including the smart analysis as well as the automatic extraction of information and knowledge will offer entirely new opportunities to companies. However, at the very same time, companies’ IT systems face tremendous challenges regarding the proper processing of big data, no matter whether it is unstructured data from the Internet or structured one from sensors built in production machines,” Prof. Reichert explains.
The EDOC 2014 organizers are very glad that they were able to convince three distinguished speakers holding the conference keynotes. One of Europe’s most famous computer scientists, Prof. Wil van der Aalst from the Technical University Eindhoven (The Netherlands), who is a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities and the Academy of Europe, will give a presentation about the role of Big Data in the analysis and optimization of business processes on Wednesday. In the following days, Dr. Heiko Ludwig from the IBM Research Center in San Jose/USA and Prof. Dr. Barbara Weber from the University of Innsbruck will give talks about specialized topics in the area of Cloud Computing and Business Process Management.
Regarding the keynotes it is to be finally emphasized that students from Ulm University are allowed to attend the keynotes for free (after a registration on the website). The local EDOC 2014 organizers – Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert, Nicolas Mundbrod and Rüdiger Pryss – thereby want to strengthen the important interplay between teaching and research. Further information about the conference, the keynote speakers as well as the opportunity to quickly register for the conference are available on the official website http://www.edoc2014.org.