Winfried Lamersdorf is full professor and head of the Distributed Systems Group at the Informatics Department of Hamburg University, Germany. Volker Tschammer is head of the ECCO Competence Centre at Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin, Germany. Stiphane Amarger is Manager of the Sophia Antipolis Laboratory, Corporate, Technology Group, Hitachi Europe SAS in Valbonne, France.