There has been a massive move in recent years with companies looking to build broad ecosystems around their products.

In the old days, a software vendor would create a product and, somewhat grudgingly, let developers integrate with it for the super-niche opportunities that the core platform itself couldn’t cover. Times have changed since then, however, and the rise of the long tail of specialist organizations has meant a growing recognition: that vendors cannot hope to cover the majority of use cases themselves, and need to look to third-party partners to create tools to augment their own products.

In every sector — CRM, ERP, PSA — there has been a huge move to create broad ecosystem of interdependent third-party vendors that leverage each other’s tools to deliver customer needs. This has been especially so in the developer space with the growth of componentized, modular developer tools that people can use as virtual Legos when building their own software products.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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