730003Project VISIONClosedLegacy RDA Grant for R&DInnovate UK'VISION' will require a new architectural approach and to meet market demand it must provide significant technical and commercial benefits. This new architecture will be based upon a Services Platform through which all of the inventory management applications will be linked i.e. the Services Platform will act as a 3PL Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The planned benefits for the new architecture will be to: • Enable Proteus to make its products available as a set of integrated services that can be sold on a per usage basis as opposed to fixed licenses. This will allow 3Pls to tailor costs to their direct needs while enabling Proteus to control their deployment costs; • Reduce maintenance costs for Proteus and its clients while improving the level of service for maintenance. Release as a Cloud based service means that support is focused on the hosted versions only. Once the hosted service has been upgraded then all instances will be automatically updated. This reduces the time and cost of maintenance and allows for regular updates for continually improving the service; • Enable Proteus to respond more rapidly to the functional and service needs of their clients by deploying new services based upon novel combinations of established and new services for inventory management systems. New products based upon different combinations of the base can be created and deployed rapidly. A 'sell-up' migration path can also be created therefore a 3PL can provide better and more services to its clients; • Simplify the difficulties of integrating the Proteus range of services with approved third party service suppliers. The service interfaces and application programming interfaces will be released to approved third party developers so that other products can be integrated to the Proteus product set. This will promote the use of the Proteus products as core inventory management systems and will help other vendors provide integrated solutions.