Flexiant joins €4 million DICE Consortium

Flexiant has announced its involvement in the €4 Million HORIZON 2020 Research Program, DICE. The purpose is to define a development methodology and related tools to accelerate the development of business-critical data-intensive cloud applications.

Flexiant joins leading organizations and universities across Europe in this collaborative research project funded under the ICT theme of HORIZON 2020 Research Program of the European Union. The DICE consortium, coordinated by Imperial College (UK), also includes ProDevelop (Spain), Netfective (France), University of Zaragoza (Spain), Athens Technology Centre (Greece), Xlab Razvoj (Slovenia), Institutul E-AUS (Romania), and Politecnico di Milano (Italy).

Head of Research at Flexiant, Craig Sheridan said, “Developing software that meets the high-quality standards expected for business-critical cloud applications remains a barrier to entry for many small and medium ISVs because they often lack resources and expertise for advanced quality engineering. The DICE consortium will tackle this challenge in support of these ISVs across Europe.”

Building on the principles of model-driven development (MDD) and on popular standards such as UML, MARTE and TOSCA, the project will define a methodology that can define data and data-intensive technologies in cloud applications. The consortium will apply the methodology to develop a quality engineering toolchain offering simulation, verification, and numerical optimization to drive early design stages of application development and guide software quality evolution.

Sheridan said, “Increased demand for data-intensive applications capable of exploiting Big Data technologies such as Hadoop/MapReduce, NoSQL, cloud-based storage, and stream processing offers ISVs opportunities for growth. DICE will enhance the capability of small and medium ISVs to enter the Big Data market.”