The 38th European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication (ECOC 2012) was held in Amsterdam on September 16-20, 2012, and saw a massive acceptance of papers based on STRONGEST results. Thirteen papers were accepted, and one of them was invited (“Infrastructure and Architectures on Demand for Flexible and Elastic Optical Networks” by D. Simeonidou, N. Amaya and G. Zervas)