Cyan – Cloud-based Mobile Line of Business Solutions

Cyan is Blue Dot’s framework for cloud-based mobile Line of Business (LOB) solutions.  A component of Blue Dot’s Advanced Mobile Platform, Cyan provides an optimized communications and integration infrastructure that supports device synchronization for many different mobile devices and platforms as well as integration with many different back-end business systems.  Through Cyan, Blue Dot can provide its customers with rich mobile LOB functionality, without the traditional server infrastructure investment and upfront licensing costs often associated with enterprise business solutions.

Cyan is built upon Windows Azure, Microsoft’s flexible cloud services operating system and platform for hosted hardware and software infrastructure.

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Windows Azure® and the associated Azure Platform provide a secure and reliable environment from which Blue Dot can provide mission-critical mobile LOB functionality to customers around the world.  Windows Azure also allows Blue Dot to leverage its .NET Framework development skills and expertise, and provides superb support for integration with customers’ on-premise systems.
Microsoft maintains Windows Azure data centers worldwide and provides 99.9% uptime.

Cyan solutions run on a variety of ruggedized and consumer devices ranging from Motorola MC-9000s to Apple iPhones and Panasonic Toughbooks to the latest Windows 7 tablets and slates.  Cyan applications are rich client applications – they are full featured, native applications that are always available, whether online or offline.  These applications communicate with Cyan’s cloud-based services, which in turn interact with the customer’s back-end business systems, ensuring security and reliability even for systems that were never designed for mobility.

Cyan provides customers an alternative to the up-front capital investment traditionally associated to enterprise software solutions.  Imagine avoiding the IT headaches of procuring, provisioning, and supporting yet another server.  Furthermore, imagine being able to take advantage of the consumer-grade mobile devices that your employees already have.  Turn traditional capital costs into operating expenses and pay only for what you use.
Cyan enables a pay as you go Software as a Service model for rich mobile LOB solutions that used to be the exclusive domain of lowest common denominator mobile browser or telnet applications.

Architecture

Mobile Applications - Cyan’s mobile applications are rich, smart client applications built using the native tools and SDKs for the target device.  Whenever possible, these applications are designed to use local device storage to provide store & forward functionality and to seamlessly support continued use when a network connection is intermittent or not available.

Cloud Infrastructure - Cyan’s cloud infrastructure provides specialized communication services that are optimized for modern wireless networks and mobile devices.  The appropriate service is automatically invoked depending upon the type of communication request and the size of the data payload to be transferred.

Cyan also provides an extensible integration framework that supports multiple Cyan-based solutions and allows mobile applications to interact with one or more back-end systems, in parallel or in serial via configurable business orchestration processes.  This integration framework utilizes the Windows Azure Platform and SQL Azure to provide dynamic scaling both up and down and to ensure the most efficient use of cloud resources during the peaks and valleys of real-world use.

Back-end Business Systems - Cyan is compatible with most hosted and on-premise Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.  Cyan Integration Services interact with a number of EAM/ERP systems that support Web Service-based integration and utilizes the Windows Azure Service Bus to connect to systems running on Java, Ruby, PHP and other platforms.