Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella summed it up at the World Economic Forum in Davos: “There are platform providers who use the platforms to improve their own products and those who want to improve their customers’ performance with their platform products. He didn’t name any names, but anyone who wanted to understand knew that data octopuses like Google or Facebook were in the first category, Microsoft itself in the second.
Both forms are examples of the platform economy – currently probably the most popular business model in business circles. It is no longer just a matter of transferring one’s own resources to the cloud and thereby achieving efficiency and cost advantages. Rather, the goal is to make the cloud your own product – even if you don’t operate it yourself. If automobile manufacturers provide the services for their cars and vehicle fleets via a platform and thus expand their own product range to include mobility services, then everyone involved in the ecosystem will benefit. When machine builders offer additional features such as predictive maintenance through the cloud platform, it improves machine utilization, reduces maintenance costs and increases effectiveness.
In Davos, it was agreed that these forms of platform economy are the most promising consequences of digital change. This makes it all the more important for practically all providers to network their products via the cloud and equip them with new software functions. But platform economics also requires that the central corporate solutions not only control planning, production, sales and customer relationships, they will also accompany the products themselves through their life cycle in the future. For this we need completely new integration scenarios. For example, an ERP system must know the current status of a product even when it is at the customer’s – for example, because a new software update is due or because the customer has not used the product for some time.
However, these integration scenarios often fail due to the lack of integration capability of the enterprise solutions. Therefore we have created the actesy metadata framework, a tool that connects existing solutions with cloud platforms. For example, article and customer masters can be extended by additional fields without great effort, so that this new information from the life cycle of the product can be entered. In addition, you have the option of redesigning internal workflows in such a way that the products are integrated with the customer – for example, to install new updates automatically and workflow-controlled on a regular basis. Finally, it is also possible to add additional user interfaces to the existing company solutions so that the new information can also be seen and maintained.
And of course we also help you if you simply want to collect the usage data of your customers. It goes without saying that we strictly adhere to the requirements of the European Data Protection Basic Regulation (DSGVO).
Platform economy requires completely new integration scenarios. With the actesy metadata framework you create the technical prerequisites. And if you would like us to advise you on the conception of a new business model for cloud-based services – just give us a call.
And what can we do for you?
We look forward to hearing from you at info@actesy.com
See you in your next digital project!
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