Report from Cloud World Forum: Cordys’s Fortuitous Architectural Choice

Report from Cloud World Forum: Cordys’s Fortuitous Architectural Choice

I spoke at Cloud World Forum in London last week, and I had time to peruse the numerous vendor booths at the event. One in particular caught my eye: Netherlands-based Cordys.

I have followed Cordys since its very early days, as they were a player in the SOA marketplace in the 2000s. Now their marketing centers on Cordys Cloud, a combination ESB and BPM PaaS tool in the Cloud.

Such messaging immediately makes me skeptical, as traditional ESBs as well as BPM tools are inherently Cloud-unfriendly. They are typically built out of heavyweight middleware, pieced together from multiple product acquisitions. They are generally single tenant and inelastic, unable to scale horizontally.

I was already aware that Cordys didn’t copy the Frankenstein approach that IBM and particularly Oracle followed to build their SOA platforms — you know, buy a bunch of parts and hope for lightning. On the contrary, the Cordys story differentiated them from other SOA platforms because of the vision, and in particular, the money of its founder, Jan Baan.

You may remember Baan from his eponymous 1990s ERP product. As the story goes, he cashed out before the dotcom crash and used his sizable fortune to fund the creation of the Cordys platform from the ground up. As a result, it has always competed favorably with the Frankensteins of the world, although Cordys has always been strongest in Europe.

But Cloud? Just because the product was intentionally architected rather than pieced together doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re any more Cloud-friendly than their competitors, right?

As I learned at Cloud World Forum, there’s more to this story. Jan Baan cut his teeth in the ERP world, after all, and one of the fundamental problems with ERP packages is that large enterprises end up with so many of them. It seems that every line of business in every geography needs their own, resulting in a mishmash of miscellaneous packages. Baan wanted to avoid this situation with Cordys, so he made sure it was architected to support multitenancy. And he made this decision before the Cloud hit the scene. Before anybody knew how important multitenancy would be to offering the Cordys platform in the Cloud.

Remarkable insightfulness or dumb luck? You be the judge. But my money is on the former. Rarely if ever does a product vendor make a fortuitous architectural decision by accident.

Share the Post:
XDR solutions

The Benefits of Using XDR Solutions

Cybercriminals constantly adapt their strategies, developing newer, more powerful, and intelligent ways to attack your network. Since security professionals must innovate as well, more conventional endpoint detection solutions have evolved

AI is revolutionizing fraud detection

How AI is Revolutionizing Fraud Detection

Artificial intelligence – commonly known as AI – means a form of technology with multiple uses. As a result, it has become extremely valuable to a number of businesses across

AI innovation

Companies Leading AI Innovation in 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been transforming industries and revolutionizing business operations. AI’s potential to enhance efficiency and productivity has become crucial to many businesses. As we move into 2023, several

data fivetran pricing

Fivetran Pricing Explained

One of the biggest trends of the 21st century is the massive surge in analytics. Analytics is the process of utilizing data to drive future decision-making. With so much of

kubernetes logging

Kubernetes Logging: What You Need to Know

Kubernetes from Google is one of the most popular open-source and free container management solutions made to make managing and deploying applications easier. It has a solid architecture that makes

ransomware cyber attack

Why Is Ransomware Such a Major Threat?

One of the most significant cyber threats faced by modern organizations is a ransomware attack. Ransomware attacks have grown in both sophistication and frequency over the past few years, forcing

data dictionary

Tools You Need to Make a Data Dictionary

Data dictionaries are crucial for organizations of all sizes that deal with large amounts of data. they are centralized repositories of all the data in organizations, including metadata such as