5 7-sven abels

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Dr. Sven Abels, [email protected]

Benefiting from early RTD phases in ICT SMEs

An example from the FP7 Adventure project within Ascora GmbH

Digital Enterprise and Business Innovation

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• Background – Participation in RTD projects during PhD

– Also a lot of activities in a bigger SME

– But:

• Big change: Started entrepreneur business in 2007

• Different perspective on RTD projects

• Especially as things like exploitation, time-to-market, etc. are majorly important in the first years for an SME

• Now = 5 years later

• First feedback based on our participation in ADVENTURE

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• Ascora GmbH: – SME ICT company

– Own company building in 2011

– Offices in Lower Saxony (Ganderkesee, Delmenhorst) and Berlin

– 20 People in total: 18 Full Time + 2 Freelancers Almost all of them with an IT-Background

– What do we do?

1. IT Business Solutions

– Data Management and Integration / Interoperabilty

– Services / SOA and Cloud based systems

– eHealth

2. End User App development (mainly Desktop, but also Mobile, Web)

1.3Mio active and registered customers (~8 Mio users) Distributed under own labels and under third party white-label approaches

Reaching from 9.90 € to 39.90 €

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• High number of users means:

– Large amount of web server requests (avg ~475.000 per day)

– Large amount of support tickets / CRM requests

– Large amount of license checks

– Large amount of messages

– Large amount of … well… everything. ;-)

• Management of customers and licenses via an old MySQL-Based solution – Managed customer data

– Managed licenses

– Managed invoices, emailed payment reminders etc.

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• Status:

– Created for managing ~20 k users

– All data interlinked, many different languages, horrible DB design. ;-)

– But it worked

After a while…

• The solution started to become inflexible: Many different scripts, etc. accessed it. It was safer to not change the data model

• Also: The solution got slower and slower, mainly because of Joins that came with the old Hibernate solution

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• What happened:

– We went international in 2008 We started using the comment field to note the language of the user

– Payments had to be international and we needed credit cards. So we cooperated with a payment service in 2008

We started using the comment field to note payment service reference ID

– Customers came in (no idea why that has happened) and growth became a problem. Some people had different accounts and we had to merge them.

We started using the comment field to note the reference between users

– …

• A good advice: We found out that it gets chaotic when you start using the comment field for more than 5 things at the same time. ;-)

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• The normal way would be:

– Get a new DB design, based on proven and scalable SQL database

– Create a new and holistic system on top of it

– Ensure that things like joins are minimized

– And ensure that the data access is always encapsulated, e.g. via an ORM

• However, we did it differently, because of our participation in ADVENTURE

• ADaptive Virtual ENTerprise ManufacTURing Environment

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

• Virtual Factory – Multiple factories may form a virtual factory

– Integrated ICT

• Leverage information exchange

– Interoperability at a deeper technical level

• Definition of data formats for exchanging information

• Ensuring that factories can be technically connected

• Plug – Factories provide information

• Semantically enriched descriptions of offered manufacturing capabilities and products

• Exposed as services

• Play – Factories model manufacturing process

• Semantically enriched descriptions of required manufacturing capabilities and products

• Manufacturing processes modeled as composition of services

– Identify particular partners who offer a distinct product

ADVENTURE – The Plug-and-Play Virtual Factory

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• For more info see:

http://fp7-adventure.eu

• Or download the FP7 ADVENTURE app in the Apple App Store or in Google Play

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• Early phases = Meaningless for SMEs?

– Too much research

– Mainly preparation

– No possibility for reuse

– Mainly for academic partners

– …

• Does it ever pay off from a commercial perspective?

• Wait a bit… here is what happened to us…

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• In the course of the FP7 Adventure project, we have been studying different storage engines

• We have been working with the other partners on cloud based data storages based on different technologies including NoSQL solutions.

• This insight has allowed us

– to compare multiple storage solutions

– to experiment with new storage technologies (NoSQL)

– to take the time to measure their performance and stability

It gave us a much wider view.

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

What was the result?

• We decided to redevelop our customer and licensing solution based on the MongoDB NoSQL solution

• Remember: This is our core business component. The most important thing that we have

• It was the biggest internal project that our relatively young company has performed so far.

• In beginning of September this development has been finished and the new system went online

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• Experience so far: – Much more flexible

– Better integration with eCommerce payment providers (costs dropped by nearly 50%)

– Better conversion rate inside our shop (lift in conversions)

– Very easy to extend as there is no fixed database schema

– Life view, etc. Base for many many experiments

– New AB-Test each week

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• Overall, we have clearly benefited from several activities in the early phases of ADVENTURE:

• We have benefited from

– The vision and requirements report

Because it brought us to think about new storage engines at the first place

– The architecture and the functional specification Because it has allowed us to experiment with new technologies and to carefully measure the behavior and performance of them – even though it was for a different context

– The cloud storage design Because we have been able to integrate some of it into our solution

– Messaging experiments

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview

• Plus: Soft-Benefits

– Being “open minded”

– Cooperating with different cultures

– Different working environment

– Good to exchange… …especially when there are different opinions on the table

– etc

• We benefited much more from the early phases than we would have tought. Especially because we‘re an SME

Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Questions?

Dr. Sven Abels, [email protected]