Overview

You will find on the hub some posts tagged as ‘building blocks’. What are these ? What can you expect from them ? This short documentation clarifies these questions.

First remember that ESNs do not build software products. But we do, of course, maintain a clear technical strategy and policy. It may thus be relevant for us to develop, maintain or capitalize on some (so-called) building blocks that provide us with a competitive advantage to bootstrapcustomer projects.

Building Block Types

Software Components

A building block is most often a software or set of software compinents that are maintained, documented, possibly even associated with a licensing strategy or in contrary be an inner or open source software. Such building blocks look like familiar software products. They are not. Only our customers (intra or extra group) build products.

It may also happen however that we implement and support building blocks on demand our company group units. Kast is the typical example. It is very close to be a product, it has a product owner, a reviewed roadmap, and a licensing strategy.

Software Enablers

The word enabler (or accelelerator) best describes components that may not be associated with a long lifetime, or even be supported at all, but that provide an effective and valuable starting point for building new projects. Most building blocks are, in fact, enablers.

A typical example are generative AI frameworks. SHould a project start form scratch, it would require lots of effort to put in place the architecture, the various components (most often open source), review their security and maturity levels, etc..

Hence our effort to identify fairly complete and mastered assemblyset of components, ensuring the architecture, and each component is well understood and mastered.

Why only enablers then ? Simply because it would be counter-productive and at the end a penalty to maintain components that may become obsolete after only a few months.

Practices and methodologies

Last, some building block may be associated with our expertise more than in specific software assets. Examples are:

• Our internal best practice security, architecture, greenops recommandations.
• Well-identified referentials: the ones we master and use.
• Tools and practices associated with specific consulting offerings .

What you will find on the Hub

The hub only provides very general and high level information about the building blocks. For each, refer to the documented contact to get more details such as maturity levels, licensing, terms of use, etc.

Contact

• Claire Bazin