In this paper we define square functions (also called Littlewood-Paley-Stein
functions) associated with heat semigroups for Schr\"odinger and Laguerre
operators acting on functions which take values in UMD Banach spaces. We extend
classical (scalar) L^p-boundedness properties for the square functions to our
Banach valued setting by using \gamma-radonifying operators. We also prove that
these L^p-boundedness properties of the square functions actually characterize
the Banach spaces having the UMD property