On this site the project partner of VISA are described and presented with their professional areas. Under the URL address of the institutes and companies further references can be found:

The company DECOIT GmbH & Co. KG (www.decoit.de) is an IT competence partner to work out efficient technical solutions for their customers. Business processes and communication will be optimised in each project additionally. The company creates new IT solutions and implement them. This work will be done in close collaboration with their customers. If IT products are missing on the market, DECOIT will find out own solutions and develop them. Therefore, in cooperation with national and international partners DECOIT is able to realise different IT projects, successfully.

The professional area of the company includes:

1. Definition of company strategies regarding evaluation and assessment of the market for know-how setup of their enterprise customers.
2. Assessment of products independent from vendor or manufacturer for the development of efficient IT solutions.
3. Technological consulting of companies with own know-how for holistic solutions. That includes consulting from a basis concept till a customer requirement specification. That is necessary to implement new IT solutions without problems into enterprise networks. 
4. Development of own IT solutions for creating added value for the customers. 
5. Software development of own solutions in the area of E-Business, E-Commerce (B2B, B2C), and Networking for own niches. 
6. Research and development projects to increase own know-how, create new products, and find new innovative partners.

The DECOIT GmbH & Co. KG has branch independent customers from the small and medium enterprise (SME) market. Large scale enterprises will be supported by new IT concepts (e.g. IT security concepts). SME companies get new concepts, implementations, and continuous IT support. Therefore, DECOIT GmbH & Co. KG is a full-service provider of flexible and secure solutions. Based on open source software mainly, the company develop new software products. In ESUKOM, the company is responsible for the coordination of the whole project. Additionally, DECOIT is an industrial development partner, which will work in assessment, conception, development, and implementation within the project. As vendor of IT security solutions, the company is very interested in further development, use, and marketing of the ESUKOM results.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) is an autonomous research organization with a decentralised organisational structure, which currently maintains more than 80 research facilities in Germany. The Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (Fraunhofer SIT, www.sit.fraunhofer.de/en) is one of the pioneers within the field of IT-Security in Germany and Europe and has experience in development and promotion of security technologies and in embedding of security technologies into already established applications to make them trustworthy. The working areas of the about 165 employees range from basic applied research, the development of prototypes to product testing and customizing and implementing tailored security concepts and solutions.

Fraunhofer SIT has worked and is working in a number of projects that are particularly relevant for VISA. These include the FP7 project Nanodatacenters, in which Fraunhofer SIT developed trustworthy platforms for Peer-to-Peer based transmission of multimedia data. Fraunhofer worked on the establishment of secure identities (EU FP7 SWIFT) and other projects, like serenity provided a foundation for security analysis. Furthermore, Fraunhofer SIT is actively involved in the work of the Trusted Computing Group and have been engaged in trusted computing projects with industrial partners like NSN, Nokia Siemens Networks, Siemens as well as the german BSI (the Federal Office for Information Security).

The Fraunhofer SIT is a specialist in the field of IT Security in Germany. The diverse experience of national and international projects will be made available in ESUKOM and for the VISA partners.

Collax – Flexible IT (www.collax.com)

Flexibility, cost-efficiency and independence are crucial success factors for small and medium sized enterprises. This is why Collax GmbH develops IT solutions that help companies like this remain flexible, make the most of their limited budgets and always be ready for the future.

Collax GmbH provides two type of server solutions: All-in-One, out of the box servers such as the Collax Business Server, the Collax Security Gateway and the Collax Groupware Suite, as well as the modular Collax Platform Server: A simple plug together fully customisable modular server. Construct any server based on plug-in software modules like: Security, storage, archiving, network management/optimization, communication, backup and much more.

An important component of the Collax portfolio is the Collax V-Family. This product family builds on the Collax virtualization server (based on KVM) to create a fully highly available cluster. It also features the revolutionary Embedded SAN: The most economical highly available SAN. This Collax V-Family lets even small and medium sized companies to consolidate their infrastructure, increase their hardware utilization and create a fully high-available platform.

Beside these product solutions the Collax Platform Server is also used as the basis for holistic solutions for ISVs as well as highly flexible IT infrastructures for OEMs.

Collax GmbH has its head office in Munich and was created in 2005. Today Collax has approximately 30,000 installations and over 6,000 customers. Collax solutions are sold indirectly through approximately 600 partners: Distributors, System Integrators and VARs as well as ISVs and OEMs. For more information: www.collax.com

The University of Applied Sciences and Arts (www.fh-dortmund.de) is involved with the Faculty of Computer Sciences with Prof. Dr.-Ing. E. Eren, Head of the Laboratory LISA (Laboratory for IT-Security Architectures), which will be used as platform for VISA. LISA has been concepted and realized as a modular development and evaluation platform for IT-security architectures. It has the following functions:

1. Platform for the practical education
2. Laboratory for theses
3. Laboratory for R&D projects
4. Laboratory for the cluster "Mobile Security" within the research focus federation "Mobile Business & Mobile Systems"
5. Demo & Solution Center / Competence Center

The University of Applied Sciences and Arts has expertise in national and international R&D projects, and is an accepted innovative partner for research and development. The University is positioned in regional and supra-regional cooperation structures. Various research focus federations such as "Mobile Business & Mobile Systems", "Kommunikationstechnik", "Process Improvement & Computerunterstützte Qualitätssicherung", "Medizinische Informatik", "Angewandte Microelektronik", "Arbeit im Bausektor" and "Computersimulation im Maschinenbau" and the Competence Platform "Kommunikationstechnik und angewandte Signalverarbeitung (CAS)" represent research activities. The Faculty of Computer Sciences is actually involved in the following projects: nanoLOC, EENEAS, LOFT, DiPP, NUMERIS-DASA, OmniRob, Geriatrie online, EHPEC NRW and "Mamma@kte.NRW".

NICTA (National ICT Australia Ltd) is Australia’s Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence. Our primary goal is to build and deliver excellence in ICT research and commercial outcomes for Australia. NICTA aspires to be one of the world’s top ten ICT research centres by 2020. Since NICTA was founded in 2002, it has created five new companies, developed a substantial technology and intellectual property portfolio and continues to supply new talent to the ICT industry through a NICTA-supported PhD program. NICTA has five laboratories around the country. With over 700 people, NICTA is the largest organisation in Australia dedicated to ICT research.

The information in this e-mail may be confidential and subject to legal professional privilege and/or copyright. National ICT Australia Limited accepts no liability for any damage caused by this email or its attachments.

IT-Security@Work GmbH (ISW, www.isw-online.de) was founded in 2008, and is a young, dynamically evolving consulting company.

Our main office is located in Mainz, Germany and furthermore you find us in our branch office in Dreieich, Germany. We offer our clients effective and efficient support in the area of security consultancy and strategy and assist in the area of risk and compliance management.

Our topics also include the development, introduction and improvement of day to day operational processes as well as qualified project management or IT management. We support a wide range of technologies, such as server virtualization, storage management as well as configuration management or business process evaluation and improvement.

Our highly qualified team is closely working together with different Universities and academic institutes to guarantee the providing of services, on the basis of latest developments in IT technology, strategy and process policy.

Our goal is to enable our clients to reach their short, or long term business objectives, by providing quality consultancy, or hands-on support in the area of IT strategy, IT management, in line with their respective compliance and security requirements, by introducing respectively supporting risk assessment and risk management.

Our comprehensive service offering enables our clients to focus on their diverse core business competencies and objectives, while we provide customized and tailored IT Management and technology solutions, individually developed to align In-house IT Technology, Security and Compliance components with the business and operations processes.