We’re going to have to live with that P word for the foreseeable, but it means different things to different people in different contexts. I asked for help to clarify my thinking and I’m sharing it with you.
Right, first up, I pinched stuff from my fellow editor, Dawn Bushaus, and her brand new, free ebook, Platform: Join the revolution. It looks at the essential elements of platform architecture and the roles for communications service providers and their partners in the platform economy. She writes that from Alibaba to Uber, platform strategy has two key elements, and it is important not to confuse them:
First is the platform business model, where companies build digital ecosystems or marketplaces connecting customers with producers of goods and/or services, making it easy for them to do business, rather than playing a direct role in the supply chain (think, Airbnb, eBay and Uber).
Second is a technology platform, which supports the electronic marketplace and facilitates the digital business model. Many platform businesses began with a platform business model in mind, so they purposely built their infrastructure and IT systems to support such a model from the outset. Others, including most communications service providers, are now evolving their business models to take advantage of their infrastructure, IT systems and connectivity to facilitate and create digital ecosystems.
Where does platform as a service fit in?
Clear so far, but how does a platform-based business relate to platform as a service (PaaS)? They aren’t the same thing, but they are closely related. This is how Barry Graham, who’s head of our Agile Business & IT program, put it:
Anything as a service (XaaS) describes a wholesale delivery model, which is tightly coupled to cloud computing. The model provides something that previously you’d typically have bought as a product and now consume as a service. PaaS provides remote hardware and middleware to offer, for example, web hosting, although you will still need WordPress or another application to run on top of it.
Here’s a text box from our ebook explaining the role network operators can play in delivering Paas and other XaaS services (infrastructure, network and software as…) AND marketplaces like Amazon or Uber or all those other mega-corps. That’s the really exciting stuff, which is also a bit confusing because…
Platform-based businesses (which support marketplaces – you know Uber and all that lot) rely on the advantages of cloud too (speed, scale, secure and affordable back-up, avoiding big upfront capital costs and various pricing options) and indeed can run entirely in the cloud (like Netflix runs on AWS). But they bring buyers and sellers together via highly scalable applications that they, the providers, control.