Several research communities in Europe exploit e-Infrastructures, sharing data and computing resources with Grid and Supercomputing technology. However the inherent complexity of these technologies has limited their wider adoption and their long term sustainability: designing, developing and operating a computing infrastructure for an e-Science community remains challenging and costly.VENUS-C will develop and deploy an industrial-quality service-oriented platform based on virtualisation technologies to serve research and industrial user communities, leveraging previous experiences and competences of grids & supercomputing, while investigating new sustainable business models.For Europe to remain at an international competitive edge, it needs to continue investing aggressively in new computing technologies such as those proposed by VENUS-C. These could develop into an essential infrastructure of the information economy.VENUS-C will foster the development of Cloud Computing service offerings taking advantage of existing international opportunities and European industrial potential. Ten years ago, Europe successfully applied a similar approach with Grid computing, importing key technology from the US to quickly become a world-wide leader.By exploiting commercial solutions, but avoiding vendor lock-in with effective interoperability, VENUS-C will provide an easy way to deploy end-user services, dynamically extending e-infrastructures capabilities, addressing all aspects of a sustainable infrastructure.VENUS-C is a Europe-driven industry-led consortium with skilled partners and a strong, international advisory committee formed by worldwide experts in distributed computing and scientific applications. The user communities involved are: Bioinformatics, System Biology, Drug discovery, Civil Protection, Civil Engineering, and Digital Libraries. Twenty short-term experiments will be supported in the second year of VENUS-C through a competitive selection process.