About the Authors

Saeid Abolfazli is a research lead and big data analyst at Xchanging and YTL Communications, Malaysia. His research interests include mobile cloud computing, parallel and distributed systems, and big data analytics. Saeid completed his PhD at the University of Malaya in 2014 where he served as a research member and part-time lecturer. His PhD was fully funded by the University of Malaya as a high-impact research project. Saeid was also a lecturer for the Ministry of Education and Khorasan Technical and Vocational Organization between 2000 and 2006. He is a member of the IEEE Society and IEEE CS Cloud Computing special technical community (STC). He served as Publicity Chair of ISSRE in 2015 and reviewer for several international conferences and journals on computer science. For further details, visit his Web page at www.mobilecloudfamily.com/saeid (accessed November 21, 2015) and contact him at abolfazli@ieee.org.

Lailani L. Alcantara is an associate professor at the College of International Management and Graduate School of Management in Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU). Her research interests include innovation, entrepreneurship, international expansion, and social networks. Her current research projects include ubiquitous computing business and innovation diffusion. She has published articles in the Journal of International Management, Management Decision, Japanese Journal of Administrative Science, Management Research Review, Journal of Transnational Management, and Asian Business and Management. She has received research grants from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan, the Highly Commended Paper Award from Emerald Publishing, and outstanding research and teaching awards from APU. For further details, visit her Web page at https://sites.google.com/site/lailanipark/home (accessed November 22, 2015).

Peter Altevogt is a performance architect at IBM Germany Research and Development GmbH in Boeblingen in Germany. His interests include hardware architectures, information management, cloud computing, high-performance computing systems and performance analysis using discrete-event simulations and queueing modeling. He has built up and led performance teams for IBM BladeCenter systems, IBM information management software products, and cloud management software. He is currently working on performance analysis of next-generation processor systems. He has authored numerous publications and holds various patents. For further details, contact him at peter.altevogt@de.ibm.com.

Frederico Alvares is a teaching and research associate at Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Nantes and his interests include cloud computing, autonomic computing, and self-adaptive component-based software development. His major contributions include a mechanism for the coordination and synchronization of autonomic cloud services and the application of discrete control techniques to build correct self-adaptive component-based applications. For further details contact him at frederico.alvares@inria.fr.

Alaka Ananth is currently working as a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore, India. She had completed her postgraduate program at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal Mangalore, India. Her research interests include cloud computing and algorithms. She has five papers to her credit. For further details contact her at alaka.bhoomi@gmail.com.

Alexandru-Florian Antonescu is a research associate in the Department of Products and Innovation at SAP Switzerland. He received his PhD from the University of Bern (Switzerland) in 2015. He obtained his Master degree in the management of information technology, and his diploma in computer science from University "Politehnica" of Bucharest (Romania). His research interests include distributed computing, scalability of cloud systems, large-scale statistical data analysis, and mobile computing. For his PhD he investigated the use of service-level agreements in cloud environments for scaling distributed infrastructures. For further details contact him at antonescu@iam.unibe.ch.

Mehmet N. Aydin is an associate professor of management information systems (MIS) in the Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences at KADI&c.dotab;R HAS University. He holds a PhD degree in MIS from the University of Twente in the Netherlands. His interests include cloud computing, agile software development, and business applications of social network analysis. He has published over 40 articles as journal papers (e.g., in the Journal of Database Management, Information Frontiers, and the Journal of Enterprise Management), book chapters (e.g., in the Springer series on Lecture Notes in Computer Science), and conference proceedings (IFIP 8.1, CAISE). His contribution to the research field of method engineering and agile methods has been cited in various studies. He can be reached at mehmet.aydin@khas.edu.tr.

Kapil Bakshi is a distinguished systems engineer for Cisco Systems Inc. He has over 19 years of experience in the industry in various roles at Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and other salient high-tech companies. His current areas of focus are cloud architectures, big-data analytics, datacenter applications, and software-defined networks. He holds leadership positions in several industry forums and bodies. Kapil is a prolific author and industry contributor, with several publications, papers, and books. He also holds patents in data analytics and service provider domains. He holds a BSEE, a BSCS and an MBA from University of Maryland, College Park, and an MS in computer engineering from Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at kabakshi@cisco.com, Twitter: @kapil_bakshi and https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbakshi (accessed November 22, 2015).

Diana Barreto is a research assistant at the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems Laboratory (CLOUDS Lab) at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her interests include distributed systems, cloud computing (especially platform as a service) and multicloud environments. She received her BSc in 2006 in systems engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia. In 2008 she received a graduate diploma in software construction at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, and in 2013 she finished her MSc degree in information technology at the University of Melbourne. She worked for more than 6 years, designing and developing distributed applications for telecommunications and financial companies. For further details contact her at dianibar@gmail.com.

Salman A. Baset is a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His research interests include cloud computing, DevOps and configuration management, telco and IPTV analytics, and Internet protocols. He has co-designed the RELOAD protocol for building peer-to-peer communication systems, which is now an Internet RFC. Currently, he serves as the vice-chair of the SPEC OSG cloud subcommittee on cloud benchmark standardization; he is a core reviewer on the OpenStack Chef-based deployment project (https://github.com/stackforge/openstack-chef-repo, accessed November 22, 2015), and a chair of the distributed and fault-tolerant computing (DFTC) professional interest community at IBM. He is a recipient of the Young Scholars Award from the Marconi Society in 2008 and a best paper award at IPTCOMM in 2010.

Pierfrancesco Bellini is a professor of programming methods for electronic calculators, School of Engineering, at the University of Florence. His interests include ontology design, formal methods, temporal logics, distributed systems, and software engineering. He received a PhD in electronic and informatics engineering from the University of Florence. He has been involved in European Commission projects such as ECLAP, AXMEDIS, VARIAZIONI, IMAESTRO, WEDELMUSIC, and he is currently involved in industrial projects such as TRACE-IT, RAISSS, and ICARO CLOUD. He has been the program co-chair of the WEDELMUSIC, ICECCS, and AXMEDIS conferences. He has been co-editor of the ISO MPEG SMR standard in MPEG 4. For further details, visit his Web page at http://www.disit.dinfo.unifi.it/bellini (accessed November 22, 2015) or contact him at pierfrancesco.bellini@unifi.it.

Larry Beser is currently a master technology consultant with HP Enterprise Services. His interests include demonstrating how applying enterprise architecture principles to extreme complexity delivers unique value to his global clients. Larry's roles include chief technologist and chief architect with EDS as well as HP. He was recognized for his work by being named a Distinguished SE in the program's inaugural group at EDS. While at Cisco, he invented new tools and methods for creating cloud-adoption strategies for global clients and developed 3D datacenter modeling for visualizing problem and solution complexity. His publications span datacenter energy management, cloud strategy, and enterprise architecture. For further details, visit his Web page at www.LarryBeser.com (accessed November 22, 2015), or contact him at Larry@LarryBeser.com.

Kashif Bilal is an assistant professor at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan. His research interests include energy-efficient high-speed networks, green computing, and robustness...