Cirrus

Many companies can simplify IT operations and reduce cost by moving software applications for Financials, HR, logistics, CRM1, etc. to the cloud (Software-as-a-Service). However, no standard system covers all corporate requirements. Gaining a competitive advantage requires a business to do things differently, build something unique. As a result, most companies end up investing in customization of standard systems in order to support their specific processes. These major customers will never move to the cloud if the service cannot be customized to their specific needs.

Lightweight customization is feasible in today's cloud services, such as configuration, scripting, or even add-on services. However, major customers demand deeper involvement and flexibility in customization. A business — or a 3rd party acting on behalf of the business — write software that are additions to or replaces parts of the application vendor's software. This requires a high degree of knowledge of the inner workings of the business application, since the customer code is executed assimilated in the vendor code. We call this kind of customization for custom code. Today there exist no means to allow customers to modify a multi-tenant cloud service with custom code without compromising the benefits of cloud computing. The Cirrus project aims at solving this.

Cirrus will yield novel software technology that enable custom code to execute in multi-tenant cloud services. We will also create prototypes of such customized services, in order to try out alternative approaches and to validate that the software technology work as intended. Using the project results, SuperOffice and Visma will create multi-tenant cloud services that are fully customizable.

Keywords

• Cloud computing
• Customization
• Multi-tenancy
• Custom code

Key data

• Research Council of Norway BIA project

• Start date: April 2016
• End date: March 2020
• Leader: SuperOffice
• 3 partners