The rise of platform ecosystems

You can tell things have changed at SAP when the company has a senior vice president of platform ecosystem development. The company, which built its business on creating enterprise-class, mostly monolithic software was seriously bitten by the loosely coupled, Web services, development kit bug with the 2002 introduction of NetWeaver. In this next phase, SAP is going to open up its platform even more to attract more developers and expand its "ecosystem." In fact, every major software company wants to be a the platform around which massive ecologies (thousands or millions of developer building on the vendor's platform). SAP is just the latest company to open its technology so that developers can build almost any kind of application and connect to any other application or service, rendering particular operating system and other parts of the stack somewhat less important. The important point is that all the emerging platform ecosystems (I just wrote about salesforce.com and NetSuite opening up their platforms to stimulate ecosystem growth) talk to one another. If this level of