After graduating from the French Ecole Polytechnique and a PhD in computer science, Nicolas Mercouroff joined the research center of Alcatel in 1991 as responsible of projects on telecom service development. In 1994 he joined the Core-Team of TINA-C in New-Jersey where he was leading the group working on distributed processing environment. Since his return to France he has been leading research projects on multimedia services, and was a member of TINA-C Architecture Board and Board of Director. In 1999, he joined the switching and routing division of Alcatel where he is in charge of the multimedia softswitch strategy and coordinates the standardisation activity.