Two major IT companies of the world will be creating as many as fifteen jobs as part of multi-million pound research in Northern Ireland.

Invest NI has ploughed £1.7m into the first ever physical joint project between SAP UK and Intel Corporation.

Arlene Foster, the Enterprise Minister said that while SAP and Intel have already engaged in research together in their Belfast project which got established in the month of October 2009 - was the first time they have established a shared physical location with pooled resources.

She said that it is important that these major ICT multinationals have chosen Northern Ireland as the location for this initiative,

It depicts their confidence in the IT skills available in Northern Ireland and especially the high value they place on the opportunity to work closely with the universities.

The new investment will stretch SAP's research presence in Northern Ireland and make the Intel Ireland's first ever research footprint here.

The Northern Ireland research location of SAP was established in the month of January 2005 and was the organization’s first such research location in the UK.

It had built one laboratory with Intel at the Northern Ireland Science Park in the Titanic Quarter in October 2009.

SAP supplies business software to companies of all sizes in more than one hundred and twenty countries and employs around thirty people in Belfast.

The new announcement will see another fifteen high-quality PhD level posts created.

The director of Intel Labs Europe, Martin Curley, said that it wants to follow SAP's success in Northern Ireland.

SAP having a positive experience in Northern Ireland as regards access to highly skilled people and a strong academic base, this joint venture was a very attractive option, he added.