Over 3 reports the EC Expert Group on CLOUD Computing considered the required programme of research and development for Europe to gain a leading position CLOUD Computing.  In particular it addressed infrastructure, systems development technologies and the legalistic and economic aspects. In particular the reports identified a large potential for European SMEs in providing services for CLOUD computing but this was hindered by the heterogeneity of infrastructure platforms.  This heterogeneity makes porting application deployment difficult and costly and partitioning deployment extremely difficult.  The PaaSage project was proposed partly to meet the challenges posed in the EC Expert Group reports.  In particular PaaSage provides a middleware environment to characterise applications, users, data and platforms and to optimise deployment of applications across platform(s) based on these characteristics.  A particular concern is to meet SLA (service level agreement) and QoS (quality of Service) criteria. In short, PaaSage overcomes platform heterogeneity and attempts to deploy applications optimally.