Hosted at the centrally-located Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid from 18 to 20 October 2016, Cloud Forward 2016 Conference brought together researchers and specialists from academia and industry, European R&I projects, SMEs, startups and post-graduate students to present and discuss innovative technologies in the area of distributed computing as well as new technologies beyond CLOUDs, ranging from architectures over methodologies to new applications and services. The conference focused both on research and development efforts in the domain of CLOUDs, and in future scenarios and technologies that exploit CLOUD computing as a utility, such as Internet of Things. Integral to the conference, the work of the clusters of experts and EC projects working on ‘beyond current CLOUD’ topics has been presented.

In addition to the scientific programme, CF2016 hosted an event dedicated to SMEs to investigate innovative technologies, promote business ideas and foster current game-changers arising on the market. The event, organised by Hola Cloud, AppHub, CloudWATCH2 and SLA-Ready, featured innovation and marketing oriented workshops, dedicated informative and training sessions carried out by experts from the research and the industry sectors, interactive live demonstrations of new services, technologies and R&D results, and face to face meetings amongst projects and SMEs, aimed at the development of new collaborations and R&D ideas.

Conference proceedings have been published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science and they are now available on the event webpage http://cf2016.holacloud.eu/