Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs)
and Ready-to-Use Apps
Building Blocks for No-Code Application Composition
Our CitizenTool is designed for no-code application composition, enabling business people without programming skills to quickly and easily compose and recompose applications. So-called citizen developers use this tool, for instance, to enhance and to individualize our ready-to-use apps, redesigning elements of the user interfaces or changing the available feature set. The tool also enables them to compose entirely new applications based on prebuilt Packaged Business Applications.
We at ECT continuously add new PBCs to the T-LCAP and your professional developers can also use our low-code ExpertTool to elaborate their own PBCs. These are autonomous, ready-to-use software components that encapsulate defined generic capabilities. PBCs deliver complete operational functionalities throughout the full life-cycle of an entity. For example, a PBC for a WebRTC softphone owns all data responsible for the call setup and breakdown, blending for conferencing, etc. This PBC has north- and south-bound APIs including an API that can be used for the low coding of user interfaces.
Another example of a PBC might, for instance, provide multiple device ringing, controlling the signaling (e.g. simultaneous, sequential, hunting) of incoming calls towards multiple devices, e.g. mobile and broadband phones, smart watches, softphones, etc. It also has north- and south-bound APIs, e.g. for configuration of ringing.
Both of these PBCs would typically be part of a composed application experience for apps within an individualized product for a VPBX, contact center, e-commerce, customer support, etc.
PBCs are partitioned into a cohesive set of modular components with minimal external dependencies to ensure flexibility when composing services. The black-box design means that PBC’s internal elements, including data schemas, and services, are not necessarily accessible directly. Interaction with other PBCs takes place only through published APIs and event channels.
The T-LCAP provides a private marketplace for PBCs where they can be accessed and utilized by citizen developers. It supports one-click deployment of PBCs as microservices and even composed applications are deployed with a click of a button. All this facilitates agile development.
Composable Enterprises: How CSPs Can Tap into This Emerging Market
The e-book is the second in our series on the composable enterprise and its significance for CSPs. The underlying concepts and technology are outlined in the first instalment, Composable Enterprises: An Introduction. In this e-book, we discuss how the movement towards the composable enterprise is generating new business opportunities for CSPs and then outlines two strategies CSPs can use to enter this market.
Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes (9 pages)
