The 37th European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC 2011) was held in Geneva on September 18-22, 2011, and saw a massive acceptance of papers based on STRONGEST results. Nine papers were accepted, and one of them (“Field Trial of a 1.5 Tb/s Adaptive and Gridless OXC Supporting Elastic 1000-Fold Bandwidth Granularity” by N. Amaya et al., from University of Essex) won the Fabio Neri Award, as it received the highest score in the area of backbone and core networks.