CAS Software is providing the cloud-based customer relationship (CRM) software ‘SmartWe’. This solution supports user specific workflows coming from various business areas. With the help of SmartWe’s software development kit (SDK) and UI tools, both users and CAS development partners can adapt existing apps or develop new apps for the SmartWe platform.

The apps can be offered and installed via an App Store. As these tools were initially built for a single cloud platform, it was then difficult to migrate third-party apps to another cloud platform due to deployment scripts becoming heavily dependent on the specific cloud service provider’s (CSP) APIs and management tools. As the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) started being enforced in Europe, the user apps were obliged to conform to the data storage regulations laid down. This was not an issue for the SmartWe product itself thanks to secured partner data centers but it still needed to be considered for the third-party apps that are developed by partners and users. For instance, some datasets used by extension apps, which are confidential to the users according to their data privacy needs, may not be allowed to be migrated to locations outside Europe. Furthermore, the requirements of the apps were dynamic and often updated, requiring manual updates to several scripts and resulting in slower cloud deployments for the third-party apps.

MELODIC successfully came into play here for both the transparent deployment of new or customized apps (such as compute- and data-intensive extensions), as well as to make sure that the third-party apps do not affect the SmartWe system’s performance and availability. As a direct benefit of MELODIC, a CAS partner can develop a new app for both integrating and analysing existing data from a third-party system or for analytics based on existing data from the primary CRM system, requiring secure data management and on-demand resource availability in the cloud. MELODIC calculates the optimal data placement and application deployment on the available Cloud resources taking into account performance, workload and costs.

The MELODIC platform already demonstrates promising exploitation results for CAS. The autonomic adaptation and optimization capabilities of the MELODIC middleware platform will allow the SmartWe platform and its external apps a high level of scalability. The usefulness, quality, and maintainability of the platform is expected to enable long-term use by SmartWe partners. CAS also believes that such an initiative will be very useful for partner SMEs, enabling them to adhere to the security and privacy requirements related to the data storage and processing in the cloud. The MELODIC platform could become a catalyst to federate other companies dealing with similar business scenarios and thus building a developer community around it, bound by a common driver to support and improve open solutions for cloud development and deployment.