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Why Vox exists

Business data tends to end up locked inside the systems that happen to handle it. A few situations Vox is meant to fix:

Business logic trapped in a proprietary system. A company builds its rules into its CMS or PIM, such as which products can be sold where or what's shown in which channel. Those rules then depend on the system, so replacing it becomes a large project. With Vox, the data from the CMS or PIM flows into Vox. The business logic lives in Vox as calculations that can also draw on data from other systems, such as prices from the ERP or stock from the warehouse. The CMS and PIM go back to doing what they're good at, and can be replaced without taking the business logic with them.

An AI-built app that had to be rebuilt. A company used an AI tool to build a system it needed. It worked, but it had its own storage and its own integrations, completely outside the company's existing data and processes, so it had to be rebuilt from scratch. With Vox, the AI could have built a good UI on top of a data layer that's already part of the company. The internal developers would then only have to finish the last 20%, the models and the integrations, instead of starting over.

Building your own PIM. With AI, building your own PIM, or other software for e-commerce and retail, is suddenly realistic. But building everything from scratch still isn't a good idea. Vox provides many of the fundamentals such a system needs: entities and relations, data from several sources in one place, values that vary by language or market, validation, history, permissions, an API, events and an admin UI. You build the parts that make your system yours.

Where it's going​

The goal is a data layer that a commerce or retail business can put at the centre of its systems, so that:

  • Data is never locked in. Each system does what it's good at, and the data and the business logic around it live in a place everyone can reach.
  • New things are quick to build. A new app, an internal tool or a UI built with AI starts from data and rules that already exist, instead of from an empty database.
  • Prototypes don't have to be thrown away. Something that starts as a prototype, shaped by the people who need it, can grow into a production system without being rewritten.
  • Systems can be replaced. Changing the PIM, the ERP or the CMS shouldn't mean rebuilding the business around it.
  • The data is easy to use well. It's available, documented and up to date, for apps, for integrations, and for the reports that the business runs on.

Vox is meant to get you started quickly and then step aside. The defaults are there so you don't have to build them, and each part can be replaced with your own as your needs grow, one piece at a time.