Not so long ago an organization’s applications were behind the corporate firewall in a data center (or in the office). The idea of moving them to a third-party to host, using hardware you didn’t own and that you shared with others was a foreign concept. But Amazon created AWS, allowing companies to “spin up” up servers in the cloud, and the race was on.
Since these early days almost every company, government organization, and even not-for-profits are trying to move away from having a bunch of servers with blinking lights in their offices and data centers. While this paradigm has shifted tremendously, what hasn’t changed is the mindset of what runs on those servers—your applications. At Coras, our vision for the future of applications is very different from most people.
For example, everyone knows you can go to a store and buy a simple app for your phone. So the question many ask is “why can’t I do that for my business?” But your apps on your phone aren’t really the same as the applications that run your business. A major difference is that only one person—you—is using your phone. So it’s okay that your camera really doesn’t connect to your Sudoku game, or that your note taking app doesn’t integrate with your ESPN app. It’s not critical to your life that those apps connect.
But it is critical for your business. Your business has lots of people who all play different roles. They each only see a small part of the entire picture. In fact, this is the Number 1 problem in business. How do I put the entire picture together? What is it that I’m missing that my competitors aren’t? How do I see interconnections that aren’t clear at first? These are the questions that keep leaders up at night and make applications in business a very different animal.
So how is our vision different? How is it different than either the traditional approach of a web of massive enterprise systems mixed with databases, spreadsheets, and email? Or different than the phone approach of many “micro services” that the app ecosystem represent?
We believe modern applications should be composed, not coded. That organizations should only have one authoritative source for each data source (e.g., customer list, employees, product id’s, etc.). We believe modern applications should be built on a common platform so they are pre-integrated, meaning they can be snapped together to leverage the “single source of the truth” data source. Your account list should drive your help desk ticketing app, and your CRM app, and your finance app, and so on.
You shouldn’t have to pay a truckload of developers to integrate your applications. The platform you are using should take care of that for you. Imagine the difference between building out of Legos versus having to be a plastic injection engineer and the time and cost differences. This may seem like a silly comparison but that is essentially what most companies are doing when they pay developers to integrate enterprise applications or integrate a myriad of SaaS products.
So that’s where our vision is different. Pre-integrated applications, running on the same platform, and leveraging one data source. That’s our new paradigm for modern applications in the cloud.