Digital Enterprise and Business Innovation
Benefiting from early RTD phases in ICT SMEs
An example from the FP7 Adventure project within Ascora GmbH
Dr. Sven Abels, abels@ascora.de
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• Background
– Participation in RTD projects during PhD
– Also a lot of activities in a bigger SME
– But:
• Big change: Started entrepreneur business in 2007
• Different perspective on RTD projects
• Especially as things like exploitation, time-to-market, etc. are majorly
important in the first years for an SME
• Now = 5 years later
• First feedback based on our participation in ADVENTURE
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• Ascora GmbH:
– SME ICT company
– Own company building in 2011
– Offices in Lower Saxony (Ganderkesee, Delmenhorst)
and Berlin
– 20 People in total: 18 Full Time + 2 Freelancers
Almost all of them with an IT-Background
– What do we do?
1. IT Business Solutions
– Data Management and Integration / Interoperabilty
– Services / SOA and Cloud based systems
– eHealth
2. End User App development (mainly Desktop, but also Mobile, Web)
1.3Mio active and registered customers (~8 Mio users)
Distributed under own labels and under third party white-label approaches
Reaching from 9.90 € to 39.90 €
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• High number of users means:
– Large amount of web server requests (avg ~475.000 per day)
– Large amount of support tickets / CRM requests
– Large amount of license checks
– Large amount of messages
– Large amount of … well… everything. ;-)
• Management of customers and licenses via an old MySQL-Based solution
– Managed customer data
– Managed licenses
– Managed invoices, emailed payment reminders etc.
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• Status:
– Created for managing ~20 k users
– All data interlinked, many different
languages, horrible DB design. ;-)
– But it worked
After a while…
• The solution started to become inflexible: Many different scripts, etc. accessed it.
It was safer to not change the data model
• Also: The solution got slower and slower, mainly because of Joins that came with
the old Hibernate solution
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• What happened:
– We went international in 2008
 We started using the comment field to note the language of the user
– Payments had to be international and we needed credit cards.
So we cooperated with a payment service in 2008
 We started using the comment field to note payment service reference ID
– Customers came in (no idea why that has happened) and growth became a problem.
Some people had different accounts and we had to merge them.
 We started using the comment field to note the reference between users
– …
• A good advice: We found out that it gets chaotic when you start using the
comment field for more than 5 things at the same time. ;-)
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• The normal way would be:
– Get a new DB design, based on proven and scalable SQL database
– Create a new and holistic system on top of it
– Ensure that things like joins are minimized
– And ensure that the data access is always encapsulated, e.g. via an ORM
• However, we did it differently, because of our participation in ADVENTURE
• ADaptive Virtual ENTerprise ManufacTURing Environment
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

ADVENTURE – The Plug-and-Play Virtual Factory
• Virtual Factory
– Multiple factories may form a virtual factory
– Integrated ICT
• Leverage information exchange
– Interoperability at a deeper technical level
• Definition of data formats for exchanging
information
• Ensuring that factories can be technically connected
• Plug
– Factories provide information
• Semantically enriched descriptions of offered
manufacturing capabilities and products
• Exposed as services
• Play
– Factories model manufacturing process
• Semantically enriched descriptions of required
manufacturing capabilities and products
• Manufacturing processes modeled as composition
of services
– Identify particular partners who offer a distinct product
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• For more info see:
http://fp7-adventure.eu
• Or download the FP7 ADVENTURE app in the Apple App Store or in
Google Play
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• Early phases = Meaningless for SMEs?
– Too much research
– Mainly preparation
– No possibility for reuse
– Mainly for academic partners
– …
• Does it ever pay off from a commercial perspective?
• Wait a bit… here is what happened to us…
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• In the course of the FP7 Adventure project, we have been studying
different storage engines
• We have been working with the other partners on cloud based data
storages based on different technologies including NoSQL solutions.
• This insight has allowed us
– to compare multiple storage solutions
– to experiment with new storage technologies (NoSQL)
– to take the time to measure their performance and stability
It gave us a much wider view.
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
What was the result?
• We decided to redevelop our customer and licensing solution based on
the MongoDB NoSQL solution
• Remember: This is our core business component. The most important
thing that we have
• It was the biggest internal project that our relatively young company has
performed so far.
• In beginning of September this development has been finished and the
new system went online
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• Experience so far:
– Much more flexible
– Better integration with eCommerce payment providers (costs dropped by nearly 50%)
– Better conversion rate inside our shop (lift in conversions)
– Very easy to extend as there is no fixed database schema
– Life view, etc.  Base for many many experiments
– New AB-Test each week
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• Overall, we have clearly benefited from several activities in the early phases of
ADVENTURE:
• We have benefited from
– The vision and requirements report
Because it brought us to think about new storage engines at the first place
– The architecture and the functional specification
Because it has allowed us to experiment with new technologies and to
carefully measure the behavior and performance of them – even though it
was for a different context
– The cloud storage design
Because we have been able to integrate some of it into our solution
– Messaging experiments
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Overview
• Plus: Soft-Benefits
– Being “open minded”
– Cooperating with different cultures
– Different working environment
– Good to exchange… …especially when there are different opinions on the
table
– etc
• We benefited much more from the early phases than we would have tought.
Especially because we‘re an SME
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de

Questions?
Dr. Sven Abels, abels@ascora.de
Ascora GmbH, http://www.ascora.de