The purpose of the ICSOFT-EA 2013, the 8th International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested on information technology, with a practical focus on software engineering and applications. The conference tracks are "Enterprise Software Technologies", "Software Engineering and Systems Security", "Distributed Systems", and "Software Project Management". Software technologies are essential for developing any enterprise information system, encompassing a large number of research topics and applications: from programming issues to the more abstract theoretical aspects of software engineering; from software security to mobile applications; Distributed systems, ubiquity, software quality as well as project management and other related topics are included in the scope of ICSOFT-EA.