Review of the New Corezoid Cloud OS

Have you ever had the experience of wishing to undertake and complete an IT project quickly? For example, not in 6 months, but to present the prototype by the morning? Or, at least, to keep within 1 week? Have you faced such situations when some great idea that comes to you in the evening, is destroyed by the scepticism of developers, testers and the entire IT team at the morning meeting?

And maybe you remember situations when you wanted to enter the market of another country, and realised that now you’ll have to write almost the entire source code from scratch? Or maybe you got into a mess when the team leader was quitting the company, and you had to dedicate a lot of time to understanding the entire logic of a code written by him?

If you are a programmer, have you ever felt the inspiration to start a new project, and then sank into routine support for it afterwards? If you see yourself in some of these descriptions, you’ll be curious to know the following story.

What is Corezoid?

Corezoid is a new cloud operational system for creating IT solutions with the use of automata-based programming with explicit state selection.

Advantage No. 1. Speed of IT Projects Implementation

I’ll tell you a story about the way the task of routing calls to call centre was solved in one bank. The facts are as follows: customers call the hotline. Being guided by the phone number, it is required to determine the customer identity, to check what designed services he/she already has, and to send this customer to the appropriate skill-group of consultants. Before implementation of Corezoid, call routing had been included in the source code. If, for example, it was required to send retirees to some desired skill group not from the 4th day of each month but from the 5th day, replacement of one digit demanded a lot of time.

Just imagine: a call centre employee comes to developers, describes the essence of the task. And the developers say: «No problem! Give us your TS». The employee writes the TS and the developers queue it, according to the priorities of the other tasks. Once the task is performed, the matter depends on testers who check the correctness of the changes made. And then all these people wait for a couple of days for the release of the next patch, which will contain this change. And everything for 1 digit only!

Corezoid enables separating the code from the business process logic.

Advantage No. 2. Establishing Friendly Relationships Between Various Software Complexes

Here’s one real task. We have a banking loyalty platform «Bonus+». The restaurant is ready to give its customer, the cardholder of MasterCard connected to «Bonus+», a 5% discount. One fine day, the restaurant contacts the bank and asks to set up «Happy hours», on Monday from 10 AM to 5 PM, to give a 10% discount for working days, and 3% in the evening and on weekends.

The bank manager makes a call to the third party company, a processing solution supplier, and describes the task. The company employees will happily work making this redesign for 6-9 months and loads of money. Corezoid enables making these settings just in a few minutes.

If desired, discounts for female students in the night club from 11 PM to 1 AM. If desired, Birthday discounts for all customers. Options are limited only by the marketers’ imagination. And there’s no need to spend money on developing your own loyalty programs: people already have their bank cards; your task is only to invent discount policy rules.

Advantage No. 3. Control of Complex Business Processes

For historical reasons, such procedures as new card activation and PIN code change have been located in different software complexes. As the result, a customer had to make two trips; first you activate your card, and then change your PIN code on it. Although, if a person changes his/her PIN code on a card issued anew, it is obvious that such card can be activated at once. Nothing of the sort.

Activation and PIN code change business processes are located in different software systems for which two different persons are responsible. No one wishes to be responsible for someone else’s source code. In this situation, Corezoid enables one not to program at all. One business analyst can set up a simple logic: «If PIN has been changed, to activate the card – that will be enough». At the same time, he will write all maintenance and service texts for processing of possible errors. The source code does not have to contain anything else. Business process logic is now configured separately. Changes can be made even 20 times a day, without involving programmers.

Advantage No. 4. Simplicity of Shaking Up the Business Processes

«The favourite subject of SAP is a deep knowledge of business processes. However, if we try to look for this knowledge in our software, remember that we mean hundreds of millions of code lines, we’ll see that the place where all information related to IT business processes would be concentrated, simply does not exist», once stated Ike Nassi, Senior Vice President of SAP Research Labs.

When business processes are spread throughout the graph of applications and people, it looks like a mess in the nursery.

Corezoid Cloud OS enables separation the source code from the business process logic. So, now the nursery looks neat. If you wish, you can open the closet and see all your business processes placed neatly on their shelves.

There is a strict difference, either to peer at hundreds of code lines code, trying, as Neo in «The Matrix», to understand what they really mean, or to look at some carefully visualised business process scheme.

Advantage No. 5. Inspiration for Programmers

The first working day of some inspired junior. ‘Hooray! I will be the creator! I wish to create a beautiful code! Several years pass. The code is written long time ago. And you are asked to make the umpteenth change. Corezoid spares you from refined tortures. Real engineers, architects and creators can concentrate on solving the really useful tasks. For example, they can get down to car traffic automation or start developing software for drone flight coordination.

Advantage No. 6. Robots and Smart Cities

Corezoid Cloud OS is useful not only for sorting business processes; it is also capable of coping with hardware management, that is, to operate with robots and infrastructure of «smart cities«.

Here’s one simple example from the life of my girlfriend. She has a robot cleaner. A simple toy cleaning dust in the house. At the plant in Taiwan, this robot’s brain was interwoven so cruelly that, when its battery charge falls under 5%, it must rush for recharge to the base station. But the poor robot grew old, and 5% charge is no longer enough to reach the electricity source. If its software were stored in Corezoid cloud, the android could be saved by changing one digit in its firmware, for example, from 5% to 10%. And now, a sad fate awaits it.

Here’s another curious task. The Traffic Police operates an IT system controlling traffic lights. The Housing Department operates a database of city residents. The State Electricity Administration has an electric power management system. The Municipal Enterprise of Water Supply and Waste Water Treatment has a management system for water supplies. Modern cities have hundreds of IT systems that don’t know how to communicate with each other. These systems are supported by an army of developers who keep writing the same code each year. Costs rise to infinity, and efficiency falls to zero. Corezoid enables storing processes that are crucial for the city, in the cloud.

Various systems acquire the ability to communicate with each other. Shared applications written in one agency can be used in another one with ease. External developers can offer their business processes for sale. «Smart Cities» of the future, now such a frequent subject of articles in mass media, are impossible without a core, without their own digital heart.

Advantage No. 7. Business Analysts Instead of Programmers

Here’s one true marketing case from the life of the bank. You need to launch an email newsletter with the offer to download the Sendmoney mobile application to customers who have made a payment online through the bank website during the last month. Earlier, in order to perform this task, an e-mail marketing manager had to write an application to IT, wait for the sampling of customers and customisation of the sending logic. If you wished to change texts or images, to change the conditions of sending emails, you wrote a new application every time.

In Corezoid, everything is much easier: customise the sending logic as you wish and don’t distract the IT guys at all. Change texts and images even 100 times a day if you so wish. If you want, divide the customers into segments, conduct A/B tests, and obtain your statistics immediately. It is the dream of every e-mail marketing manager.

Advantage No. 8. Joint Amendment of Business Processes

Here’s another true dialogue from the life of the bank.

– Hi guys. I have a task, to create a system for quality control of service in branches, – a programmer Tatiana writes to her colleagues in the neighbouring IT department one Monday morning.

– Um… We wrote something similar last year, for quality assessment in a chat and in a call centre. Catch a code.

– And what am I supposed to do with it?

– We don’t know. It may be useful.

– Ok. I’d better write everything anew. Otherwise it will be like last time. I was rewriting your code all through the whole month and gave it up finally – had to re-write.

– Sorry. Good luck.

With the appearance of Corezoid, this dialogue would look as follows:

– Hi there! Do you have a quality assessment business process?

– Yes. It is configured for a chat and a call centre. Let me scrabble about for it. Here you are.

– Wow! Cool, thanks. Now I am going to attach my API to it and re-set for quality assessment in offices.

Fixing someone else’s code is hellishly difficult. But to take an existing accurately visualised scheme and to substitute your API onto it – that’s simple.

Advantage No. 9. Unique Processes but not People

Imagine that you are some post office. What if Vladimir quits the company and this guy’s mind stores all the mail delivery business process logic? Corezoid has the answer, ‘Calm down, let him leave. Business process logic is visualised and stored in the cloud. People quitting the company no longer carry the critical knowledge away in their heads.’

Advantage No. 10. Operating Speed and Personalization

In Corezoid Cloud OS, high performance speed has been achieved. In particular, PrivatBank, which processes 10 million transactions per day (about 500 per second), operates on this platform. For comparison, PayPal processes approximately 46 transactions per second with peaks of 100 transactions per second (according to the book «Digital Bank» by Chris Skinner).

Speed means everything in modern life. Marketing research states that an offer made within 20 minutes from the customer’s transaction increases the conversion by 20%. The police say that the probability of finding a missing person after 3 days falls to zero. Corezoid is capable of providing real-time communication with millions of customers. A person paid for a purchase in Duty free – so immediately offer him/her the VIP-service via push-notification.

Chris Skinner managed to describe the value of personal real-time communication with each customer in his «Digital Bank» in a very apt way, ‘It would be great to go and see Scissor Sisters, – you’re typing on your Facebook page and receive a comment from the bank, ‘You can afford a ticket, and we have found it for you.’ Or you write in Twitter: ‘I’m thinking on buying this second-hand Aston Martin’, – and the bank sends you a private message: «Are you crazy? You already have an overdraft of 20 thousand dollars.’

Corezoid enables analysing customer behaviour in real time and, being governed with reasonable rules, make personalised offers to them. In this case, customer information represents raw material from which gold is mined in the 21st century.

Apple, Amazon and Google are businesses built on data and based on data analysis as a key resource. Someone uses raw material or human resources in order to create value, and these companies use data, notes Chris Skinner. Corezoid Cloud OS makes this story technically feasible not only for IT industry giants but for small business as well. Arranging business processes and starting communication with customers is now possible for anyone

– pizzeria owners, taxi drivers, medical practitioners.

Advantage No. 11. Safety and Dashboards in Real Time

Corezoid is a cloud in a cloud. Safety is provided by hosting on Amazon secure servers. At the same time, the OS itself does not store data on processed transactions. Business owners need not worry about business processes conducted via Corezoid because no customer data leakage is possible there. Corezoid stores only detailed statistics on performance of each business process node, if desired, any statistics can be analysed inside and out. This is another pleasant bonus of Corezoid, displaying dashboards by business processes in real time.

Advantage No. 12. Let the Data Speak I must have started my article from this advantage of Corezoid. It is the basic one. Corezoid does not simply allow dividing data and business processes. Corezoid describes processes and data in terms of finite-state automata with an explicit state selection, that is, it makes and turns data into processes.

Data = processes

State generates new processes generating new data, new states and new processes, and so on, till the cows come home. For example, data about the customer’s payment for purchases at Duty free moves him/her into a status of a «potential VIP customer», and a business process of attracting a person to VIP service starts until this person moves to the «VIP customer» state.

Plato once described the world of Eidos as representing a combination of «absolute and perfect samples of possibilities.» Similarly, Corezoid transforms an abstract set of bits and bytes in data bases into life, into the start of actual business processes.

Advantage No. 13. BigData is nothing Without BigProcess «While most enterprise architects are familiar with the promise — and, unfortunately, the hype — of big data, very few are familiar with the newer concept of “big process.” Forrester first coined this term back in August of 2011 to describe the shift we see in organizations moving from siloed approaches to BPM and process improvement to more holistic approaches that stitch all the pieces together to drive business transformation”, writes the financial expert Clay Richardson in his blog on Forrester.com.

Big Data appeared as a consequence of lack of transparency and fragmentation of business processes within the company. Business is frequently compared with the living human body. But the human body has no centre for BigData analysis. Why? That’s because all processes are organically linked. An incredible amount of data generated by the human body every second, instantly generates new processes, with no additional ‘statistical data processing centre’ (they are processed by evolution).

Finally, business, which starts operating from a «big process», solves the BigData problem. Though correct processes representing the essence and data is just a consequence.

Big Data tools, by the way, similarly to Google Analytics, represent an attempt to invent a cure for chaos. Although, companies require transparent business processes and other states that can be easily analysed. Some developer, who, instead of describing all potential states and processes within the business, hopes for some Analytics, shall have many difficulties because he does not understand the ESSENCE of the processes, and, as the result, a task is solved narrowly but not systematically.

So, let’s sum this up and write a simple formula:

Corezoid = states * (data + processes)