Capabilities
ABS is organized around business capabilities — the things your organization actually needs to do, and what you actually adopt. You don't buy a list of screens; you turn on the capabilities you need, and they work together because they share one business model, one identity, and one security model.
Three ideas keep the whole platform coherent:
- Capabilities are what the platform does — identity, finance, commerce, operations, and the rest.
- Modules are how capabilities are delivered — self-contained feature packages you enable per tenant. One capability may be delivered by several modules; a module always serves a capability.
- Platform foundations are why it all coheres — the shared kernel, business language, trust, integration, and operations layers beneath everything. You don't adopt these directly.
The eight capability families
| Capability | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Identity & Access | Authentication, authorization, federation, SSO, RBAC |
| Trust & Compliance | E-signatures, certificates, trust evidence, non-repudiation, ESG |
| Finance | Accounting, billing, fiscalization, tax, subscriptions, licensing |
| Commerce | Catalogs, pricing, orders, carts, point of sale, online stores |
| Operations | Logistics, inventory, manufacturing, procurement, projects, quality, assets, workflow |
| Workforce | HR and payroll, learning, shared workspaces, collaboration |
| Customer Experience | CRM, support, marketing, social, chat, content portals |
| Intelligence | Analytics, reporting, AI assistants, bots, decision support |
| Platform & Development | Modules, SDKs, APIs, integrations, automation, developer tools |
How capabilities become your solution
- Solutions package capabilities for an industry or use case — a retail solution, a professional-services solution, a healthcare solution.
- Modules implement capabilities. You enable the modules your plan entitles you to, and their screens, menus, and APIs light up in the Studio for your tenant.
- You extend any capability with your own modules, in C#, without forking the platform. See Module development.
Platform foundations
The capabilities coexist because they rest on five enduring platform foundations. These are the substrate — not something you adopt, but the reason everything works as one product:
- Alliance Core Libraries (ACL) — the shared kernel: the common abstractions, contracts, and standards everything builds on.
- Alliance Business Model (ABM) — the canonical business language: the shared model of entities that lets every capability coexist.
- Alliance Passport Service (APS) — trust: identity, authorization, federation, security, and governance.
- Alliance Business Platform (ABP) — integration: the REST, GraphQL, gRPC, MCP, and SignalR surface for every client.
- Alliance Business Studio — operations: the cockpit where you run, shape, and extend your implementation.
The mobile experience lives in Alliance Business Pocket. For the full story, see The platform.