Flex4Apps

Project results

The Flex4Apps partners built reference architectures, providing template solutions for dealing with monitoring and analytics, and they developed the methodological support to help teams leverage these. For the reference architecture, they opted to make this available via oneclick installs and they have published some of their work in a publicly available GitHub. The methodological insights were bundled in the book “Hyperscale and Microcare, the digital business cookbook”, written by Nick Boucart and Peter Verhasselt from project parnter SIRRIS. The book is now in its third print already, with over 1000 books sold to date.

Exploitation

Thanks to improved monitoring and analytics, project partners were able to serve their customers better, yielding improved retention and customer satisfaction as well as, in some cases, even better, sharper pricing of their offerings.

Project partner Unifiedpost (formerly Inventive Designers) has been operating a Flex4Apps inspired platform in production for several years now. While it was initially used as an internal tool to support product management and customer support for one particular product line with both premise-based and cloud services, today the company is using the platform to provide daily business value and insights across several important product lines. This data helped the technical team to find the cause of a very rare race condition occurring in production, while giving sales a detailed view on actual product usage, resulting in better tailored contact with customers. Since its inception, it has required very little upkeep and has kept on churning through the masses of received data with ease.

In terms of improved services, the Belgian SME DataStories is now using Flex4Apps’ automated algorithms in 25-30% of their projects, allowing them to move into data-driven product management and take on more complex assignments. Genode’s home automation use-case has reduced their trusted computing base by a factor of 20%, making an exhaustive examination of its code base feasible, and has grown their customer base on ARM by 70%.

The project partners didn't limit themselves to impacting only the partners in the project. By publishing their reference architectures, others can benefit from their insights too. This is testified by the Fintech start-up STOKR, a crowd investment platform powered by Ethereum Blockchain. Flex4Apps greatly helped the team to untangle initial complexities related to the technical architecture of the platform. Flex4Apps perfectly understood the need of complex financial platforms like STOKR and provided the right advice.

The open approach of Flex4Apps, combined with the innovative nature of the framework, will play a crucial role in the digital transition. In the future, a company's most valuable intellectual property will be its deep customer understanding, backed by data, rather than its technology. Companies that take up Flex4Apps stand to gain the most from this insight.