HOLA CLOUD targets to establish effective mechanisms for efficient collaboration among the members of the software, services and Cloud computing community building on a decade of experiences acquired by people who are themselves core members of this community, and extends this collaboration to stakeholders who can turn the community knowledge into sustainable economic growth. Through a completely new take on scientific collaborations, researchers in the field will be given the opportunity not only to present their results, but they will be pushed to look into the future. The resulting scientific roadmap will be alloyed by database tools at the forefront of technology with federated results from past and present projects and social media into extended, searchable knowledge synthesising what Europe knows, and who knows it. This will enable companies, governments, and politicians to discover best practice solutions to their problems, and to identify future challenges that must be addressed to move European software intensive industries forward. HOLA CLOUD will initiate an advanced conference series producing and revising an annual technology roadmap and providing an efficient venue for the members of the community to meet and exchange results and ideas for the future. To lower the barriers for industrial take-up, in particular with SMEs, HOLA CLOUD will organise an SME Event for companies to understand better how to create solutions to their problems together with the best European experts in the field. These events will be overarched by an advanced on-line knowledge platform ensuring the persistent access to information for all stakeholders. All the HOLA CLOUD activities and results will be promoted and supported by an efficient communication strategy involving an audience way beyond the normal constituency of the software, services and cloud computing domain with the aim to establish a European Cloud based eco-system that will endure after the end of the project.

The VRE4EIC project addresses key data and software challenges in supporting multidisciplinary data driven sciences. These include: 1) understanding complex user requirements across domains by closely involving committed user communities; 2) improving the quality of VRE user experience by providing user centred, secure, privacy compliant, sustainable environments for accessing data, composing workflows and tracking data publications; 3) increasing VRE usage in multidisciplinary research domains by abstracting and reusing building blocks and workflows from existing VRE initiatives; 4) improving the interoperability of heterogeneous discovery, contextual and detailed metadata across all layers of the VRE; and 5) promoting the exploitation of VRE4EIC solutions to different research communities and commercially. The project contributes to the Work Programme through innovations in the following areas: • support of excellent research through improved VREs and interoperation of heterogeneous VREs leading to new multidisciplinary science; • increased user acceptance through support for trust, security and privacy throughout the VRE architecture; • a novel VRE architecture, prototypes and enhanced metadata that can be used for future multidisciplinary VREs; • a semantic web, linked open data view of VRE information allowing cross-linking to open government data enabling heterogeneous discovery; • interoperable standard software services retro-fitted to enhance existing VREs; • solutions for societal challenges demonstrated in the environmental and earth science domains (environmental pollution, climate change, earthquakes), building on 25 real use cases; • increased VRE adoption to other domains and research communities through a training programme and learning environment to empower researchers to utilise the full potential of VRE4EIC and to enhance collaboration. VRE4EIC covers all EU member states and EFTA countries, and will affect 70,000 researchers all over Europe.