SINGAPORE - Cros Network (cros.network) is launching to streamline the collaboration between enterprises using distributed ledger. Cros is a cross-organizational platform designed to facilitate business process execution on a foundation of ownership, trust, and control. With this protocol, businesses can collaborate and securely execute their business processes in a tamper proof manner, without trusted intermediaries.

While the global B2B e-commerce market size is estimated to reach $20.9 trillion by 2027, the industry has operational shortcomings that would prove more inefficient inching towards this growth; especially that business process collaboration could triple to $100 billion in the next five years, with 80% spent moving, aggregating, cleansing, verifying and sharing data with other businesses and stakeholders. Enterprise revenues are estimated to decrease by 27 to 40% as coordination costs increase proportionally by degree of specialization. Retailers in Asia alone lose around $40 billion annually, reliant on siloed processes and absence of trust among enterprises.

The traditional view of markets and enterprises relies on sequential thinking, whether it is supply-chain or business value chain. Companies are slowly realizing that they are part of a larger network, not a link in a chain. This demands an ecosystem approach to resource planning, business process execution and collaboration between the various nodes of the network. Being a cross-organizational network built on distributed ledger, tamper-proof and seamless, Cros aims to fill in these gaps.

"The solution we envisioned was an innovative cross-org collaboration and integration platform; a decentralized integration platform, into which small and medium businesses can collaborate and correctly execute their business process without the need for trusted intermediaries," says Cros' visionary founder Ajay Bhandari, the former Google and Microsoft Chief Architect.

"Cros translates existing collaborative process models to distributed ledger and ensures that the process is secure and is executed correctly. Distributed ledger checks for compliance before changing a state of process, providing a single source of truth to all participants, and full traceability."

Bhandari offers a solution for challenges related to data exchange, complicated transformations, traceability and shared truth, and trust between parties. Cros would be empowering enterprises to collaborate with ease, integrate with their IT infrastructure and Cloud ERPs, while preserving data guardianship and maintaining control.

Similar problems were solved within the enterprise (intra-business integration) utilizing databases, service bus and ERP systems. However, those technologies and platforms are insufficient for cross-enterprise collaboration, due to concerns of ownership, trust and control. Enterprise today runs on centralized systems, coordinating transactions between suppliers, vendors, business partners and regulators. It is difficult to build consensus on running and operating cross-enterprise collaboration while addressing ownership, trust, and control issues.

A paradigm shift is necessary, based on a completely revised definition of "ownership," "control," and "trust", the hallmarks of the operational model of traditional business. Distributed ledger technology can be the enabler of such a paradigm shift towards cooperative competition, or "co-opetition".

Cros is the flagship project of Bussr Technologies (bussr.com), a leading Singaporean payments infrastructure platform for mobility companies. Bussr Technologies is partnering with best-in-class entities to build Cros, and foster the development of services and applications that will run on it.