The G12 project recently started by National ICT Australia (NICTA)is an ambitious project to develop a software platform for solving large scale industrial combinatorial optimisation problems. The core design involves three languages: Zinc, Cadmium and Mercury (Group 12 of the periodic table). Zinc is a declarative modelling language for expressing problems, independent of any solving methodology. Cadmium is a mapping language for mapping Zinc models to underlying solvers and/or search strategies, including hybrid approaches. Finally, existing Mercury will be extended as a language for building extensible and hybridizable solvers. The same Zinc model, used with different Cadmium mappings, will allow us to experiment with different complete, local, or hybrid search approaches for the same problem. This talk will explain the G12 global design, the final G12 objectives, and our progress so far.