European Commission Funding for Open-Source Federated Cloud Platform

Cork/Amsterdam
10 September 2020

Planet Crust, the leading open-source Low-Code Development platform and Salesforce alternative, is being funded by the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative to deliver the Corteza platform as a federated cloud solution for record sharing. Crust, the founder and full-time maintainer of the Corteza Project, will enable the platform to share select components of data layer or entire data models, on a one-to-many or many-to-many basis. The new features will allow business data, but also open data sets created by public sector organisations and academia to be shared more easily.

Among other features, Corteza provides a decentralised cloud alternative to the likes of Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics365. Unlike these expensive competitors, Corteza can be self-hosted, maintained and customised from top to bottom by organisations – granting full sovereignty and control to both organisations and end users. The Corteza platform is used by well-known corporations, Fortune 1000 businesses, and large-scale public institutions.

“We are delighted to have been given this opportunity by the European Union NGI Zero Programme” says Niall McCarthy, CEO of Planet Crust and Chair of the Corteza Project. “Our goal is to deliver federated clouds where the user and administrator experience looks, feels and operates like centralised clouds, but which is in practice underpinned by a more equitable, decentralised architecture of cloud peers.”

“Much recent work on decentralised systems has focused on peer-to-peer use cases rather than cloud-to-cloud sharing at scale” says Michiel Leenaars, co-ordinator of the NGI Zero Discovery fund. “But of course organisations need to share a lot of data too, and that data changes all the time. We don’t want thousands of stale copies of data lingering around. The new functionality of Corteza developed within the project will make it possible for even small organisations to share complex data as equals in a standardised manner. Just like you can follow a social media account, you will be able to maintain a single origin of data with all the security and privacy benefits. The new web standard, ActivityPub, subsequently enbles this data to be used across hundreds or even thousands of places on the internet in near realtime. This represents an interesting step forward for organisations wishing to collaborate, while also wanting to simplify their own setup and protect the privacy of their valuable users.”

“Corteza Federation will resolve the need for high quality, standards-based collaboration with the need for cloud digital and data sovereignty demanded across Europe and beyond” adds McCarthy. “Delivered in the modern, high-performance computing languages of Golang and Vue.js, much of Crust’s efforts will also focus on ensuring that the Corteza user experience (UX) is everything organisations expect and more from competitive cloud technology.”

Corteza Federation will be available for release in December 2020. A full suite of mock-ups can be viewed on https://cortezaproject.org/corteza-federation-previews.

Federated records in a Corteza Low-Code platform application

About Corteza

Corteza is the Digital Work Platform for Humanity. The Corteza project builds a 100% open-source, self-hosted cloud platform for growing your organisation’s productivity. It enables relationships and protects the work and the privacy of all those concerned. Corteza is developed entirely in the public domain, including its design considerations and processes. To download Corteza and for more information about the project, visit www.cortezaproject.org or follow @CortezaProject on Twitter.

About NGI Zero and the European Union Next Generation Internet

NGI Zero is a unique group of organisations that fund and nurture trustworthy, secure and privacy-strengthening technologies as part of the Next Generation Internet initiative of the European Commission. The overall mission of the Next Generation Internet Initiative is to re-imagine and re-engineer the internet for the third millennium and beyond. In order to preserve and expand the European way of life, NGI helps shape a value-centric, human and inclusive internet for all. For more information , visit nlnet.nl/NGI0 or www.ngi.eu.