FROM DEPARTMENTAL RESOURCE PLANNING TO SOCIAL SUPPLY CHAIN COLLABORATION IN THE CLOUD

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1 FROM DEPARTMENTAL RESOURCE PLANNING TO SOCIAL SUPPLY CHAIN COLLABORATION IN THE CLOUD 20+ years of innovation, a story told by the Research & Development team It was during the time Jan Baan was half way through with his beyond ERP initiative (the company called Cordys), we were asked to start a new initiative to build applications to be delivered via the internet in subscription model. At that time the concept was called utility computing. It was based on the idea that software needs to be available like water/telephone or other utilities on a pay per use model. We had to build the applications on the emerging enterprise software platform Cordys. By then - early we had around 10 years of ERP experience and were responsible for the architecture of some of the new modules we developed for the latest version of Baan ERP. We were sure that the new journey of apps in the cloud would be exciting. We started off by developing some applications on the Cordys platform and we soon were confronted with the demands of a utility service and challenges in developing it on the core Cordys platform. During this period we learned the key principles of cloud computing like: Multi-tenancy Highly Configurable/Customizable Scalable Web Architecture Functioning of the application like a high responsive website At that time the concept was called utility computing... Social supply chain collaboration Page 1

2 The birth of Cordys Process Factory (CPF) When we actually started developing the first utility applications, we discovered some of the weaknesses and limitations of a complex application development platform like Cordys. One of the major challenges we faced was the basic cloud concept of multi-tenancy where data of one tenant should not be available to other tenants. The lack of customization features in the platform made the project even more challenging. It was during that time that we got connected to the people of WebEx. As a major stockholder and member of the WebEx board, Jan Baan and WebEx CEO, Subrah Iyar, did important pioneering work on the concept of collaboration. It was because of their work that we got opportunity to define a partnership with WebEx to join their WebEx Connect program. As part of the program our offering was selected to bring enterprise and on-demand applications into the WebEx collaboration environment. It was a very successful program and WebEx was considered a serious competitor of Salesforce.com, the company dominating the cloud application market at that time. WebEx successfully went public on the NASDAQ and later was acquired by Cisco, were it became their primary conferencing solution. maintain databases and you won t be able to offer the economy of scale. Apart from this they have also challenged our user interface which at that point of time was attractive but in their words not good enough to engage a web-user. In about 3 months time we came up with a new approach for multi-tenancy. It was to create a tenant based object repository (MTOR- Multitenant Object Repository) in which we could define tables, relationships and indexes. We developed web-services on top of this object repository to create and query the object with all the necessary capabilities. With this we could easily manage creation of multiple applications for various tenants all dealt from this highly scaling and responsive single repository of objects. That time, we also started reworking on our UI definition of our applications in a simple and flexible way. The result was a user interface modeler which had the power to assemble many UI components which could work on the MTOR object repository we created. Cordys platform base capabilities were used as the engine to deliver these UI s. In a similar way we also created a simple process modeling environment which was built with the capabilities to easily compose processes. The net result of this was the launch of a new application development environment, called Cordys Process Factory (CPF), in early The lightweight application development platform was available via the internet with the following characteristics: Subrah S. Iyar Jan Baan (former) Chairman & CEO (former) CEO Cordys WebEx Board member WebEx Interactions with the people of WebEx provided us with two critical inputs: 1.) multitenant applications and 2.) highly intuitive user interface. WebEx have challenged our idea of multi-tenancy and helped us to better understand the limitations of separate databases being provisioned for various customers: If you have customers then you have to Creation to deployment of an app via a single URL Highly intuitive User interfaces Rapid application development Application definition captured as models which can be executable Web services to talk to your internet applications Out of the box integration with Google apps Cordys/Google cloud platform Shortly after the public launch of the Cordys Process Factory (CPF) platform, Cordys became a Google Enterprise partner. This partnership enabled Google users to create workflow Social supply chain collaboration Page 2

3 apps on top of Google Enterprise (also known as Google Apps) and other cloud-based services. Cordys Process Factory ran independent from Google, but together CPF and Google Enterprise formed a way of putting office apps in the cloud. Through the partnership Cordys Process Factory (CPF) became the killer solution for Lotus Notes Replacement along with Google Apps and a perfect entry to Platform as a Service (PaaS) market which was already getting established with the players like force.com, RunMyProcess, Long Jump, Zoho, etc. Our most notable example of this is Valeo in France. Valeo ranks among the world s top automotive suppliers and is an independent industrial group fully focused on the design, production and sale of components, integrated systems and modules for the automotive industry. They reviewed the market and after a very competitive proof of concept, they chose Cordys Process Factory. Till today, Valeo remains as the major cloud deployment of OpenText Cordys and is a big reference for enterprise wide usage! Another CPF customer from which we learned enormously, and that improved our product, was the Japanese IT giant Fujitsu. They signed a big CPF OEM contract and challenged us to raise our game on quality. The Japanese culture is very detail-oriented with a focus on quality and adherence to timelines. They have helped us to focus our R&D organization on quality and continuous improvement. The Valeo story: Extending office collaboration suites with BPM, cloud and mobile in the manufacturing industry Valeo, a leading French automotive manufacturing organization, has been using Lotus Notes for more than 10 years with 32,000 users, 6000 applications and more than 250 servers running. Valeo was looking for an innovative way to reduce the office infrastructure costs while simultaneously improving user collaboration and productivity. Their main business challenges were: Improve user collaboration and productivity on top of their new cloud office suite Replace Lotus Notes applications Make applications available anywhere anytime with a focus on mobile Make business processes less dependent on organizational changes Increase development efficiency After a thorough evaluation of market place alternatives, Valeo decided to move to the cloud and deploy Google Apps for Business to the company s entire office-based workforce. The Cordys Process Factory (CPF) was then chosen by Valeo to add cloud based Business Process Management (BPM) and mobile capability to their Google Apps and to integrate Google Apps with their enterprise software. Valeo achieved a number of business benefits, the key ones being: Enterprise BPM for 32,000 Google Apps users 250 servers reassigned or decommissioned applications in Lotus Notes will be reduced to less than 1,000 on CPF Platform Complete Office in the Cloud with governance and control Social supply chain collaboration Page 3

4 New technology wave in Vanenburg Software After working for several years and building a widely recognized public cloud development platform, we decided to move out of CPF and join the new initiative of Jan Baan at Vanenburg Software in Vanenburg Software was formed with the idea to build cloud applications for ERP in the new way and also to focus on futuristic ideas like connecting enterprises via cloud solutions. During the rise of the Cloud, our long experience, not only with Cordys but also with WebEx, led us understand that the market needed a different approach. What we had learned is that both on-premise ERP as well as most cloud solutions are still functioning as silos for each enterprise. The question that we wanted to try and answer was: what if we can create a new cloud solution where an enterprise can join and connect to other enterprises and set up collaboration? A solution that reuses structured business logic together with the unstructured information to establish flexible business processes and collaboration that can be continuously optimized and improved, faster and quicker than ever. eration of intelligent and connected applications. Recently, this technology wave became more formalized when Forrester called this new category of application software smart-process apps. The birth of Collabrr With some base ideas we started taking a modern approach to business-to-business connectivity in the cloud. We followed the real life scenario that information exchange happens between enterprises in the form of documents. As a first step the focus was on the following things: Easy enrolment to the network Invite and connect to Partners Facilitate document exchange In fact, the whole idea was one of the first behind a new gen- The everbinding story: Invoicing across businesses powered by Collabrr everbinding has chosen Collabrr to create a hub for enterprises to send and receive invoices to their business partners. The current pain point of receiving invoices through multiple channels and bringing them to an accounting software for processing is addressed by this solution. Invoices are sent in a standard format that can be processed easily by the document arrival processes in Collabrr. everbinding provides integration possibility to number of popular accounting applications for sending and processing invoice via this service. Some of the key business benefits include: - Savings from the use of less paper and postage. - Better communication between partners and accounting firms - Reduced manual activities - Better control cash management Social supply chain collaboration Page 4

5 The idea behind is that enterprises form networks (also know as the network economy were products and services are created and value is added through social networks operating on large or global scales) just like how people make connections with their friends and form a social network. Enterprises will become the nodes in the network with well-defined connections to other enterprises. Each node will have a set of people from the enterprise who will be able to participate in the collaboration process across the nodes. Secure business content sharing, document collaboration and document exchange (in the form of XML documents) were the key features we had in mind when developing the product. Most recently we have added social network elements like feeds, profiles and comments. In this manner, we wanted to connect people, processes and data across the supply chain. Collabrr was the new name for the solution and it is positioned as a social networking tool to collaborate with partners on business documents. Technology choices In developing Collabrr we had to make various key technological choices. The learnings from previous cloud initiatives helped us to avoid pitfalls associated with building such an innovative new product. Some of the technical aspects we covered, include scalability & big data, intuitive user interfaces and a quick response time. Big Data Architecture Having developed a multitenant data store for Cordys Process Factory in the past we were already experienced with challenges in dealing with traditional databases and I/O (Input/Output) bottlenecks. In order to succeed, we needed to imagine a situation where collaboration could happen between any enterprises across the world in a hosted network. We therefore needed a big data architecture to capture the connections and the document collaboration. The choice finally came to a No-SQL solution (HBase) and Hadoop. This offers the required scale on a cloud infrastructure. Document Centric Workflow With our experience at Cordys and some customer development projects we learned the major obstacles and challenges of BPM projects. This is how we came to a solution for document centric workflow. Our experience with Valeo by developing a huge amount of their workflow apps has helped us to understand the average application workflow needs of enterprise. It is evident now that 80% of the workflow apps are simple which can be built with a document centric approach and also in configurable steps. Traditional BPM approach of process models with so many features supporting integrations and no flexibility to change the process easily by the end users makes the BPM deployments inflexible and it became similar to software developed in open technologies like Java. Changing executable process diagrams is not the way apps are made flexible. There has to be configuration possibilities within the application. This learning helps us to position configurable needs of the app in the hands of end users in a proper way and not as all in one executable BPM models. From Today to Tomorrow With Collabrr, Vanenburg Software is now positioned to provide a good solution for collaboration among employees, customers and suppliers, on structured and unstructured business documents. The solution enables all stakeholders in the supply chain to view and collaborate on documents in the appropriate business context, for improved collaboration, decision-making, and (project) execution. In addition, with our approach for document centric workflow, we now enable companies to build and deploy simple apps in a short duration of time and reduce cost and complexity. The solution provides an answer to 80% of the business app needs (e.g. simple, less complex apps that need to be deployed quickly and cost-effectively). The 20% more complex apps can be build on Google infrastructure (Google Apps Engine) in combination with Java and HTML5 open-source library tools. We have set-up a dedicated Indian CoE (Center of Excellence) of developers who have deep competence in all of these technologies. Our team is a Social supply chain collaboration Page 5

6 mix of young Indian talent and experience. Some of the senior members have tremendous experience in enterprise software development and a history that goes 20+ years back to Baan ERP! Our enterprise social collaboration story and solution is very enthusiastically received, and we already serve several companies in the EMEA region. Full credit to Jan Baan who very early recognised the impact that social based technologies are having within the business environment. His vision combined with our deep Cordys Process Factory experience created the ideal climate to develop a product like Collabrr. It s great to see our product getting into the hands of today s knowledge workers, enabling them to connect and collaborate succesfully with external stakeholders. Coimbatore, State of Tamil Nadu, India Saji Antony Product Development & Delivery Saji Antony is responsible for the product development ande delivery in Vanenburg Software. He is a seasonded IT professional with more than 16 years of experience in various roles in technology innovation, solution building and product management. Social supply chain collaboration Page 6