Celebrating 200,000+ Users!
As tragic as 2020 has been for many people around the world, for many within the technology sector, it has been an opportunity to break from the shackles of the past. In many ways, COVID-19 stress-tested our sector; and it has been inspiring to see how our entire sector responded across diverse markets including healthcare, education, government, business, and society overall. Entire ecosystems were forced to respond in ways that would have taken them years, instead of months, under normal circumstances. If digital transformation was already off to the races before the pandemic hit, it was turbo-boosted after it.
Within the ecosystems space in 2020, changes could not have been more drastic. In 2018, talking about ecosystems would have been perceived akin to science fiction. In 2019, early adopters began to see growth and broader acceptance of the model. In 2020, there was an explosion and as of this month we are proudly celebrating yet another milestone- 200,000 users, which is a doubling of last year, that in turn was a doubling of the year before. The metrics have gone bonkers. The average ecosystem size we work with now exceeds 30,000 users interacting with hundreds of thousands of assets flowing and hundreds of millions of data points being generated. Ecosystem workloads such as B2B marketing and ECM continue to generate stunning metrics in excess of 1400% effectiveness. What is leading to all this? Here are some key lessons from 2020 and a prediction for the near future.
“I am an ecosystem and so is everyone else. What we need is connectivity!”
Over the past several decades, the game was really about creating an ecosystem and dominating it. This monolithic model worked when it took 2 to 3 years to launch products and partners were primarily focused on a very limited set of vendors. In the era of the cloud, products are literally being launched daily and vendors are propping up all over the globe. No single player can dominate such a landscape anymore. Instead, they are finding ways to coax their partner to interconnect. Since each partner in and of themselves have become an ecosystem, the notion of a single ecosystem has shifted to that of a network connecting ecosystems.
“User Experience is yesterday’s news. We need Unified Partner Experience”
In the past decade, and influenced by B2C, everyone was talking about User Experience. But if one thinks about it, going to Disney or attending a football or baseball game is totally different from a partner looking to interconnect to five different vendors to provide a solution to their customer. What they are looking for is a Unified Partner Experience that none of the vendors can provide on their own, unless, that is, they can standardize their interconnectivity. Large organizations woke up to this reality in 2020 and started enforcing this standardization through the ecosystem paradigm.
“A portal is not an ecosystem. Stop trying to sell us yours!”
Siloed portals are out. Instead, for the ecosystem paradigm to scale successfully and rapidly, it must be backward-compatible. This means integrating with existing tools. Organizations want to connect things, not rip and replace them with yet another portal. They need ecosystem solutions that provide them control over their own data for compliance. They need them to reduce the need for change management, since users can keep on working in environments with which they are already familiar. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, in these difficult pandemic times, they require a higher ROI that provides more access to more people with less licensing expenditures and deployment/training costs.
Predictions for 2021
Based on all the above, what are some ecosystem predictions for 2021? Expect the amazing growth that we have been seeing these past few years to continue. In fact, it will multiply as more and more ecosystems are launched. More specifically:
- Ecosystems network will grow like wildfire in IT and spill over into verticals
Currently most ecosystem technology is being deployed within the IT sector. It will soon move into verticals, from healthcare to finance to you name it. - More ecosystem workloads will be deployed, and enablement will dominate the category
More and more ecosystem workloads will be launched, and most will be focused on boosting enablement and engagement. Ecosystem solutions focused on marketplaces will do well but have slower growth patterns. Lead generation ecosystem tools will not do as well because of compliance and core business data concerns. - Multi-tier ecosystems will start taking-off
Organizations want to connect to one another, but they also want to be able to connect to their own channels and their partners. The resulting architecture will be a multi-directional ecosystem model that also allows a multi-tiered approach providing a more effective push of knowledge, while also providing much deeper insight and ecosystem wide visibility.
If Digital Transformation drove the cloud to new heights, Cloud Ecosystems are proving to be the next frontier. It will no longer be limited to the organization but will now operate throughout networks of partnered organizations. This my friends, is the compelling future that awaits us.
Wishing everyone a prosperous 2021!
