Saarland, the smallest Federal State of Germany, is well known for its computer science competencies. That is a result of the concentration of well known and successful computer science institutes and several computer science related institutes on the campus of Saarland University. Moreover, a lot of SMEs working on the field of IT are located near the campus or in the area nearby to Saarland's capital, Saarbruecken. The goal of the Competence Center (CC) is to coordinate and strengthen all Computer Science activities at and around Saarland University, and - last but not least - the Saarbruecken University of Applied Sciences (in German Language: "Fachhochschule").
During the celebration on July, 19th 2004 the center has been officially established by Culture and Science Minister Juergen Schreier, University President Professor Margret Wintermantel and the Speaker of the Competence Center Professor Philipp Slusallek.

"The amount of know how, which is gathered among the CC is unique in Germany. Saarbruecken is going to be an important center for future oriented IT", said Minister Juergen Schreier. University President Professor Margret Wintermantel emphasized that "Computer Science in Saarland is equal to excellence, shown by rankings, by many national and international awards and leading research."

The speaker of the Center, Professor Philipp Slusallek underlined: "The brand Computer Science Saarland should show the IT competencies of the Saarland more distinctly than before to economy, politics and public." Technology transfer will be one main goal. The innovation chain would be consistently accelerated: From theory and basic research at the beginning, passing applied research, up to prototyping and final production in industry.

Goals:

• Optimization of the scientific and technological basis for research and economical impact.
• Center for information exchange and leading to contact and cooperation between industry, research and education.
• Focussed on internationalization, gaining students and (junior) scientists, technology transfer, and common and coordinated public relation activities

The Saarland region holds a prominent position in the German IT research community. About 30 professors and over 400 scientists are working on informatics and relative sectors. A lot of the most important scientific awards have been gained by scientists working on the campus of Saarland University. E.g five Leibniz-Awards, three Konrad Zuse Medals, the German National Future Award.

About 40 professors and well over 300 researchers are engaged in research in various subject areas related to computer science. The Saarland University was an early pioneer in the combined teaching of computer science in association with other disciplines, and has outstanding international reputation in bioinformatics, computational linguistics, business information systems, medical information systems and technology, etc.

It is obvious that such a broad- and deepness in nearly all IT reasearch areas could not be managed by a single university itself, so many important research institutes are located on campus or nearby: The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Institute for Business Information Systems (IWI), the Center for Innovative Production Technologies (ZIP), the Institute for Applied Information Sciences (IAI), and the Fraunhofer Institutes for Biomedical Technology and for Nondestructive Testing (IZFP). Also Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics has to be mentioned, it is one of most prominent international conference and research facilities for IT scientists.

This unique "climate" has led to a lot of foundations of IT enterprises, which are spin-offs of the Saarland Computer Science capabilities, amongst others: such famous firms like IDS-Scheer, SAP Retail Solutions, Infor, Dacos, etc. A lot of these new foundations (at present about 50) are supported by the Starter Center on Campus. Moreover, Science Park I and Science Park II in direct neighborhood to Saarland University provide high level facilities and infrastructure on low cost rate for founders of SMEs (not only in the IT sector).