The word “platform” gets thrown around often. At the business level, its definition is often broad, and rightfully so. In business speak, it tends to mean an economic model that emerges from allowing two or more parties to interact in a way that produces shared, positive (e.g. non zero-sum) economics. Think of Apple with the App Store or Salesforce with its Force.com ecosystem. Each company benefits monetarily from 3rd-party developers in their ecosystem who also benefit monetarily, and their users benefit through utility.

While this all makes sense, what’s often missing is a formal definition of what a platform that supports this sort of business model looks like at the technological level.

That said, taking on the challenge of defining a technology model for platforms is well beyond the scope of an insight post…but it’s well within the scope of a whitepaper. Download and enjoy!

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