What is Unibright?
The Unibright view on the blockchain The blockchain as a concept can be assessed from different point of views. It is important to understand the view of the Unibright team on the blockchain to understand the framework and the constructive applications Unibright offers and to answer the question: ”What is Unibright?” We understand the blockchain1 as a data structure that is technically implemented in a decentralized peer-to-peer network and offers the possibility to define and hold both data and functions in single blocks, the smart contracts. Some features promised by blockchain technology, like built-in security and information completeness, predestine it for use in the business integration domain.
The promises of blockchain technology We focus on the needs and demands of secure and efficient business integration. The challenges in business integration exist independently from an implementation strategy. Business integration is already happening and there will be cases, where existing technologies completely suffice to meet the demands, no matter if these technologies are based upon technical knowledge of the last decade or even the last millennium. Nevertheless, there has been a demand and a reason for moving on, say, from a direct ”information-by file exchange” strategy, over a proprietary middleware solution exchanging self-defined structured data to a cloud solution building upon industry conformant exchange formats. We understand the blockchain as next step in this evolution to solve certain problems and meet certain doubts in the area of middleware- and cloud-based business integration.
Some of the commonly agreed advantages and promises of blockchain technology encompass:
- Disintermediation Information exchange between two parties without the intermediation through a third party, eliminating counterparty risk.
- Durability, Reliability, Longevity Due to the decentralized structure, a blockchain does not have a central point of failure, hence being better able to withstand malicious attacks.
- Transparency Changes to public blockchains are publicly viewable by all participating nodes.
- Immutability Transactions cannot be altered or deleted due to the cryptographic link structure of all blocks in the chain.
- Lower transaction costs By eliminating third party intermediaries and overhead costs for exchanging assets, blockchains have the potential to greatly reduce transaction fees.
THE UNIBRIGHT MISSION
Our mission is to provide the first unified framework for blockchain-based business integration. We expect blockchain technology to become pervasive and therefore want to make the use of blockchain technology more feasible and profitable for those driving real business and not ”only” exchanging crypto currencies. We are confident to be well positioned to become the first provider for blockchain based business integration. We strive for bringing the promises of blockchain technology usage to the next level for business professionals. We are aware of and are gaining motivation out of the fact that complex enterprise system landscapes already exist. Some of these will not be touched for years, paying tribute to the principle of ”never changing a running system”. We do not see this as a defect - quite the contrary: It is an essential motivation of those standing for Unibright to offer a high-level concept and practical tools to integrate existing processes and IT-landscapes into the promising ecosystems of blockchains. We address existing teams with experts in different domains and want to make it easier for those teams to use the blockchain as one part of their versatile solutions. During the analysis stage of the Unibright ecosystem it turned out that we have to operate on two levels of modelling to achieve blockchain based business integration a software architectural level and an end user driven application level. Both levels are presented in more detail in the following sections. So what is Unibright? Unibright is a unified framework for blockchainbased business integration and a set of applications leveraging this framework.
BUSINESS INTEGRATION
What is Business Integration?
In our understanding, business integration is the use of system architectural principals, software architecture and implementation to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications. It means the integration, automation and optimisation of IT based business processes within and beyond the walls of a companys organisation. The purpose of business integration may be data integration, abstraction from specific vendors systems to ensure independence and integrity, providing common front-ends and standardized queries on available data. In demarcation of related terms, we understand business integration as one motivation to define business processes and implement business workflows on top of them.
Commonly agreed challenges to business integration can be named:
- Message Exchange Within a business workflow, different parties of a business process will need to exchange messages. Message formats, the reasons triggering a message and actions following the message have to be defined.
- Notifications When a message is sent, the sender wants to make sure the message arrived. The recipient may need to inform the sender on missing information. The notification can be part of the message exchange itself, thus leading to potential recursive problems.
- State Management Parties have to keep track of already sent messages and notifications, leading to the necessity of resending messages, update information or cancellation of processing.
- Control Flow Workflows have to be enabled to react on different parameters changing, by defining control flow with elements like decisions, choices, loops or exceptions.
- Changing Requirements Existing workflows will have to be updated. Parties have to be added, system components may be changed and changes in established control flows may be introduced.
- Data Integrity Different message formats on different parties will need mappings to ensure content integrity.
- Technical Integrity Different channels, protocols and messages have to be orchestrated to keep all parties connected to the business integration process.
- Security It has to be assured that the desired partner is reached, data holding information needs encryption and validation.
- Cost estimate It is necessary to keep track of resources (e.g. time and money spent) to evaluate the cost-benefit ratio.
Why and how should blockchain technology be used for business integration?
During the past decades, several technical approaches to business integration have been established. In our understanding, the blockchain technology should be seen as an addon to existing middleware or cloud based architectures, which have already replaced outworn point-to-point architectures.
The Blockchain as a concept has clear advantages in some areas of business integration. Still it most probably will only be one part in a complete business integration scenario, having to be included in existing IT landscapes, of whatever state they are. A blockchain infrastructure consists of an independent peer-to-peer network without a central instance. To be part of this infrastructure and to integrate with it, every party has to be part of the blockchain, meaning running or interacting with a blockchain node.
In this setup, the blockchain is monitored all the time for new events or transactions. To use the blockchain as a part of a business integration system, the current information state of the blockchain can be harmonised with information from non-blockchain systems like ERP- and legacy-systems. From a technical point of view, this means existing IT-infrastructure is connected to local blockchain nodes to interact with them, for example in calling functions in smart contracts or watching events raised and transactions performed by smart contracts.
Conclusion To benefit from the promises the blockchain offers, we need a concept that allows us to integrate specific blockchain technologies into existing IT- and business integration landscapes, which leads us to the Unibright concept.
The Unibright Concept
The Unibright Software Architecture The blockchain world is still a highly vibrant market, emitting numerous new cryptocurrencies or even new blockchains in short time. Despite all the promising advantages of blockchain, there are some intriguing problems that exist with creating or coding smart contracts today. Generally speaking, programming smart contracts is complex and error prone and uses a different approach compared to existing programming for business software. Today, creating smart contracts for a blockchain platform requires the usage of a specific programming language like Solidity for Ethereum. For companies wanting to use multiple blockchains this involves different programming languages which all come with their own requirements and shortcomings. Furthermore, extending and managing a smart contract is expensive and requires specialist knowledge, as user friendly or visually oriented tools are lacking in the field of smart contract development today. To ensure reliable and enduring business integration based on blockchain technology, we need a superordinate concept of abstracting from specific blockchain implementations. This ensures adaptability and an indispensable level of abstraction. It also reduces dependency on single blockchains, taking into account that there will be new blockchain implementations, bringing their own smart contract syntax with them. In terms of business process modelling these superordinate concepts already exist. We do not reinvent any wheel here, but adapt parts of those concepts for using them in a blockchain related environment: We describe business processes as workflows, as presented in previous chapters. When it comes to smart contracts, we need a concept enabling us not only to abstract from a certain platform specific implementation, but also from the type of a smart contract - smart contracts differ with regard to their function or role in the distributed application: A smart contract can operate as data storage, as a dispatcher, as a state machine, as a factory generating new smart contracts and many more. In our vision, a smart contract can be executed in different blockchain implementations and can be integrated in different types of enterprise system landscapes. Although our current implementations work on the Ethereum blockchain, our concept enables us to be blockchain agnostic. To combine these different levels of abstraction, we introduce a combination of Contract Interfaces, use case related templates and generation of multiinherited smart contracts and smart adapters. The basic underlying concept is 12 the Unibright Contract Interface, which is presented in more detail later.
Unibright Application Level We defined a set of system components supporting all phases of a business integration process. This helps us to abstract from the different roles in a business process, to address different levels of (expert) knowledge and to attend different execution domains:
• Business integration workflows are designed locally with the Unibright Business Workflow Designer.
• The automatically generated code is deployed, maintained and updated as Smart Contracts into a specific blockchain by the Unibright Contract Lifecycle Manager.
• Existing Unibright conformant smart contracts are monitored and queried by the Unibright Explorer, using automatically generated Smart Query Sets.
• Business processes, IT and ERP-Systems in the enterprise domain as well as other blockchains are integrated by the Unibright Connector. Smart Adapters using automatically generated configurations enable standardized connections via common technologies.
The included Mapping engine transfers interface defined objects into domain specific objects for further processing. These applications focus on business process and workflow specialists, software architects, blockchain developers and domain IT specialists in equal measure, assuring that the particular expert knowledge can be used without requiring expert knowledge in all of the other domains.
The Unibright Contract Interface, Templates, Use cases and Smart Contracts The central part of the Unibright ecosystem is the Unibright Contract Interface (UCI): The UCI defines the main structure, state variables, mappings and methods which every generated Smart Contract automatically implements, thus marking a smart contract Unibright conformant. It is the irremovable guarantee of recognizing smart contracts as part of the Unibright ecosystem, ensuring that Unibright conformant smart contracts can be found, called, maintained and connected.
Content-wise, the UCI offers the fundament to integrate smart contracts into different blockchains and system landscapes. Operators of the Unibright ecosystem can visually define workflows and choose from a set of Templates. Templates pre-define typical business workflows on a high level of abstraction. By choosing a certain template, the operator is automatically given a suitable subset of all available workflow tool set items and an initial example workflow which can be customized to the needs of a special use case. Each template brings its own purpose-built interface, which the generated smart contract will implement in addition to the basic Unibright Contract Interface. Technically, smart contracts are small computer programs, coded in a blockchain specific high-level programming language. These languages will differ in their syntax, but will share common paradigms of structural and object oriented programming. Some of these paradigms will be assumed in our concept to work, like the existence of primitive datatypes like strings, integers or bools, the possibility to unite a set of primitive datatypes in some kind of structure (structs) and to define functions working on these datatypes and optionally returning values. The set of templates will be constantly enhanced to serve other use cases and different industries.
WHY WE DO THIS?
Problem
1.Blockchain developers are rare and expensive;
smart contracts are complex and any bug is critical.
2.It is difficult to update and deploy smart contracts to different blockchains.
3. Companies don’t understand how to parse the data from a blockchain into something useful for employees and customers.
4. Teams need to integrate the Blockchain into their existing ERP / IT systems.
Solution
The Unibright Visual Workflow Designer gives anyone the ability to craft powerful Blockchain-based solutions with no coding skills or expensive developers required! Define business integration workflows visually, without coding skills.
The Unibright Contract Lifecycle Manager transforms visually designed workflows into platform-dependent code at the push of a button! It generates Smart Contracts for the most appropriate blockchain automatically.
The Unibright Explorer monitors the ongoing business process across all smart contracts and related systems. It helps to present on- and off-chain data to a useful, easy to understand dashboard.
The Unibright Connector connects existing IT landscape with different blockchains and smart contracts, using the set of predefined Smart Adapters.
ROADMAP
- 1989-2000 SAP solution provider : SPO Consulting GmbH,Germany, providing SAP related software solutions worldwide for top players like Lufthansa,Samsung,Siemens and many more.
- 2000-2010 Web 2.0 : Riding the Web 2.0 by developing SAP Enterprise Portals and Full – Stack.Net applications allowing our customers to integrate Web 2.0 opportunities into their IT landscape.
- 2011 Own integration platform : Launching the cloud based SPO Process Integration Platform (moving to Microsoft Azure in 2016), supporting business processes for top players in the banking sector and manufacturing industry.
- 2016 Blockchain spin – off : Strategic expansion of the top management, deciding on a spin – off for Research & Development on blockchain and workflow technologies with focus on Ethereum.
- Q2 2017 Unibright launch : Definition of the Unibright Contract Interface, and the Unibright Smart Contract Lifestyle. Prototypes of Wrokflow Designer, Lifecycle Manager, Explorer and Connector for Ethereum and SAP.
- Q4 2017 Business setup : Partnering up with Ambisafe and Iconiqlabs to prepare token launch, setting up business and signing contracts with seed investors.
- Q1 2018 UB connector : First working version of Unibright connector to SAP integrating Ethereum blockchains. Prototype Version of Unibright connector to.NET and JAVA connecting legacy systems.
- Q2 2018 First versions of tools : First working version of Workflow Designer, Lifecycle Manager and Explorer for internal use with Ethereum blockchains and SAP.
- Q3 2018 More templates, maro blockchains : Providing more workflow templates and specific interface to the workflow designer. Adding smart code generation for different blockchains.
- Q4 2018 Pilot customers : Beta version of Workflow Designer, Lifecycle Manager Explorer and Unibright connector. Tests and Quality Assurance. First pilot customers using unibright Framework.
- 2019 Product readiness : Tests and Quality Assurance for complete Production Readiness, adding more templates and blockchains.
TEMPLATES
Unibright is template based and targets all business sectors! We are already offering various templates like “Multi Party Approval”, “Asset Lifecycle”, “Batch Tracing” and many more. Choose a template for the desired use case, customize the integration workflow, generate code, connect to your existing landscape and monitor the ongoing business process.
MULTI PARTY APPROVAL Integrating suppliers approval processes
· Sarah is a project manager at an apparel company who has to coordinate ongoing design processes across all relevant departments.
· Via the internal ERP, She sees that Tom from Marketing just approved their promotional materials and that the Purchasing department should now submit their prime costs.
· Anna from Purchasing has to provide answers to detailed questions to other departments and suppliers, but is only able to do so by phone or email for security reasons.
Batch Tracing Tracking and communicating production process
· Dave loves Beer and is interested to learn more about how his beverages were made. He writes to some of his favourite breweries to ask about the origin of their ingredients, but does not receive a reply.
· Martin works at a brewery and is tasked with organizing data about ingredients, materials, and the company’s production processes.
Asset Lifecycle Tracking the lifecycle of a product
· Andrew must decide if his company should buy an airplane from an insolvent competitor. To do this, he needs to know about the history of the vehicle in question.
· Tina works for a regulatory authority that approves the resale of aeroplanes by checking the chain of ownership, maintenance, and repairs for each plane being sold.
· Bob is looking for detailed information on the planes he will be traveling aboard. He considers it a matter of safety and is willing to pay a few bucks more to be provided with this information.
Token Distribution :
• 67% in the public token sale
• 9% sold to seed investors
• 6% to the team (locked up for 12 months) 29
• 12% cold storage liquidity reserve
• 6% legal / token sale expenses
Token Sale Proceeds Distribution :
• (At least) 50% for platform development
• (Up to) 20% Template Generation for Business Use-Cases
• 15% for PR and marketing
• 15% setting up partnerships in industry, bootstrapping pilot customers
Here is what our CEO had to say about our time at FinTech week: "Our booth welcomed many guests from different companies, all excitedly discussing ways in which blockchain technology can improve their existing business processes.
We showcased the Unibright framework with our process templates, which offer solutions like process approval, batch-tracing, and asset lifecycle tracking. Out of all the companies presenting at the conference, I think we were the only one offering a B2B solution."
Marten Jung
CEO, Founder, Head of Blockchain Development Stefan SchmidtCTO, Co-Founder, Head of Software Architecture Ingo SterzingerLead Engineer Frontend
Author by Jalan rusak
