Will the next digital transformation frontier be ecosystems computing which socializes cloud computing and drives its use beyond the organizational “walls” to its natural next frontier—that of the entire ecosystem?
A decade or so after the inception of the Internet, most users remained somewhat silo’d and isolated from one another. Sure, they could email one another, jump on intranets or portals, and perhaps interact as communities on commercial platforms like eBay and Amazon, but for the most part, they remained disconnected and unsocialized. Myspace, Blogger, and tools like Skype started propping up to try and socialize the internet, but they were relatively rudimentary and initially not fully designed as networks- but were more like personal portals or synchronic forms of communications.
When Facebook finally broke through, it wasn’t the first attempt at social media, but it quickly became the most successfully socialized one, promising to connect students (and then anyone) with others with the simple click of one button. As simple as it may sound now, it was pretty advanced architecturally and would soon lead to a social media revolution with a plethora of other platforms like YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and LinkedIn all emerging with similarly socialized paradigms. A new internet category was born: Social Media Networks, and transformed the internet as we know it .
Fast forward to the cloud, and its earliest manifestations have been in the form of virtualized resources and solutions promising digital transformation from on premise solutions. While this has been a substantial step that brought value and efficiency, the underlying architecture of the tools and how they are used to a large degree remain the same. If I’m using QuickBooks installed from a CD or if I access it on the cloud, the tool remains within my proverbial corporate walls with more or less a similar paradigm. The same is true for Office 365 or WebEx– many of these tools moved to the cloud, but fundamentally, their forms of use did not change much on the cloud other than their backend IT elasticity.
Some cloud tools, however, have tried to bring about changes in use by providing cross-corporate (virtual)-walls features such as Slack and Teams, but these tools have been few and far between. Most other tools remain silo’d albeit they are now on the cloud: CRM remains cloud-walled, as do enablement and learning tools, LMSs, enterprise content management, automated marketing, accounting, HR, ERP, and inventory management tools to name a few.
And yet if one pauses to think about it, each and every cloud tool that is being utilized by one organization could actually see its value rise substantially if it could be extended into the ecosystem of that very organization. Imagine if an HR of one company could plug into several universities to match the profile of needs with that of the students! Imagine if the ordering system of one organization could plug into the inventory management available to many of its providers delivering Just In Time without all the complexities of old integration paradigms like EDI! Imagine if one marketing tool could extend marketing automation from one organization to all its downstream channel! And imagine if in a matter of minutes a tech provider could plug and play seamlessly into dozens of their distributors enabling their learning and certification at scale to help drive revenue! *
None of this needs to be imagined. The ecosystem revolution is already happening. We see tools like Qollabi helping ecosystem partners plan better, and tools like TIDWIT connecting and enabling complex ecosystems at scale with just a few clicks. We see tools like Channext deploying marketing initiatives for ecosystems of partners; and we see tools like Crossbeam and Reveal connecting CRM systems of exogenous organizations to share leads. All these tools are essentially “socializing the cloud” not unlike Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn once did with the Internet. The Cloud has driven IT to very dynamic levels; as the Internet once did to PCs and LANs. The digital transformation that has ensued has been notable due to virtualization and the the dynamic scaling nature of the cloud.
Will the next digital transformation frontier be ecosystems computing which socializes cloud computing and drives its use beyond the organizational “walls” to its natural next frontier—that of the entire ecosystem? Things appear to be headed in that direction.
*Some like to point to the “API economy” as being the optimal method for interconnectivity between cloud tools. The problem with this approach is that it is point-to-point, which makes it complex, costly, and therefore ultimately unscalable. See following blog for more details: https://www.tidwit.com/blog/overcoming-ecosystem-data-gaps/.
