Launched in September 2005 by 13 partners and enlarged in June 2006 to 22 partners and over 200 members, NESSI aims to provide a unified view for European research in Services Architectures and Software Infrastructures that will define technologies, strategies and deployment policies fostering new, open, industrial solutions and societal applications that enhance the safety, security and well-being of citizens.

The Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) is the tool through with a European Technology Platform such as NESSI details its strategy, its challenges and how it intends to meet them. The role of the SRA is to translate the NESSI vision into action and to guide NESSI’s implementations during the entire lifetime of NESSI.

The NESSI SRA is coordinated by the NESSI SRA Committee, which was formed by NESSI’s Steering Committee. The Committee’s mission is to define and update the NESSI SRA. Like all NESSI Committees, it is an extension of the Steering Committee and in particular is open only to NESSI partners. The specific missions of the NESSI SRA Committee are:

• to be the guardian of the integrity of NESSI within the scope of the NESSI SRA
• to define the NESSI skeleton and principles
• to redact and maintain the NESSI SRA based on the input from the NESSI Working Groups
• to trigger the creation of horizontal and vertical NESSI Working Groups
• to implement communications that are related to the NESSI SRA

The content of the NESSI SRA is elaborated by both the partners and members of NESSI. NESSI Working Groups (NWGs) constitute the core elements which contribute to the content of the NESSI SRA. NESSI Working Groups are further classified in Horizontal NWGs, Vertical NWGs and the SME NWG. Horizontal NWGs are primarily intended to provide input on the various technological research areas in scope for the NESSI Strategic Research Agenda. Vertical NWGs are primarily intended to link the business application domains (e-Health, e-Government, …) with the NESSI Strategic Research Agenda. Last but not least, the SME Working Group is intended to foster active participation by the ICT SMEs to NESSI and to ensure that the issues related to SMEs are taken into account.

Besides contributing to the NESSI SRA, Horizontal NWGs are aimed to:

• Promote the creation of NESSI communities interested in a given research topic
• Link NESSI with the relevant research initiatives through common members
• Disseminate NESSI concepts within their research community
• Participate in related activities, such as the creation of standards, in coordination with the relevant NESSI Committees

The (Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) NWG is one of the Horizontal NWG and is focused on the new generation of ITC infrastructures that will support development and execution of component services and their provision as utilities.

NESSI-Soft is a Specific Support Action (SSA) launched at FP6 whose objective is to support the work of NESSI at global level. Particularly, NESSI-Soft is responsible for:

• The setting up and operation of the NESSI-Office, whose goals are to provide NESSI (and NWG in particular) with administrative, logistics, secretarial and organisational support.
• Providing tools to the NESSI Board and Steering Committee to monitor the evolution and coordination of NESSI activities.
• Supporting activities of the NESSI SRA Committee as defined previously

The NESSI-Grid project is a Specific Support Action (SSA) launched at FP6 to support activities of the SOI NWG, with a special focus on providing the necessary support to structure and develop its contribution to the NESSI SRA in the specific area of ITC infrastructures and Grids. This contribution is materialized in the present NESSI-Grid SRA document.

In addition, NESSI-Grid provides support to activities of the Technical Group 1 (TG1) defined by the EC to coordinate debate and joint collaboration among Grid-related FP5, FP6 and FP7 EU Projects on architectural challenges which have to be addressed in the transition of the Now-Grid to the next-generation Grids. Providing the basis for this debate and joint collaboration, NESSI-Grid coordinates the development of a series of whitepapers. Note that the NESSI-Grid SRA is aimed to define a SRA focused on business environments in NESSI scenarios, while activity in TG1 is not devoted to generation of a SRA as such and, on the other hand, is not limited to address business environments in NESSI scenarios.

While contribution to the NESSI SRA in the specific area of Grid constitutes the key goal of NESSI-Grid, the project also addresses support to some activities of the NESSI ETP. In particular, activities related to definition and implementation of a strategy on standardization and how to collaborate with leading open source software (OSS) communities have been mapped into a specific task in WP4 of the NESSI-Grid SSA project. Through this task, the NESSI-Grid project will provide input for a first a debate and definition of the strategy at NESSI global level and then, afterwards, the implementation of the defined strategy in the particular area of Grids. Debate around strategy on standardization and the collaboration schema between leading OSS communities and NESSI has lead to the creation of a new NESSI Work Group on OSS. NESSI-GRID has been actively participating in its definition and will contribute in the activities of the group.

Besides the above, both NESSI-Soft and NESSI-Grid SSAs provide support for communication and interlinking activities at NESSI level. Both types of activities are aimed to achieve the widest dissemination and adoption of the NESSI Vision.