Software ecosystems shorten the distance to value
I’ve been evangelizing a theme for the past several months at SunGard that describes where I believe software is going. I call it “shorten the distance”, referring to the gap between the identification of a need and the consumption of a delivered solution that meets that need with realized value to the end-user. The distance between needs and solutions in a software context shortens with each improvement in design, construction, testing, deployment and networking technologies, however the concept of software ecosystems is shortening this distance with tremendous speed.
Shortening the distance from a software perspective involves a fundamental shift in how development occurs. A software ecosystem leverages an open platform and a community of contributors including consumers, (such as the AppExchange, App Store, FaceBook Apps, Open Source repositories, etc). I think of the power of software ecosystems in terms of The Wisdom of Crowds (why the many are smarter than the few). When an environment exists where contributions can be contributed and can be consumed, the overall realized value is exponentially greater than the proprietary and closed approach. Look for software ecosystems in the vendors you depend upon, because active communities will continually drive shorter distances between needs and realized value.
Within the SunGard Higher Education Open Digital Campus is an ecosystem called Community Source. Last year an early and limited beta was made available to a small handful of IT shops at some Colleges and Universities. With no marketing (merely Proof of Concept goals), an adoption of 50 active volunteers from 31 institutions jumped in nearly immediately to serve on committees and review boards (impressive numbers if you consider the scale of an institution of higher learning, each one representing systems that support tens of thousands of students). 61 individual contributions institutions have been submitted thus far in the limited beta and 2 contributions have even been included in baseline releases with many more in the queue. Contributions are also consumable by the community without inclusion into baseline. The output of this ecosystem is proving to provide value well beyond what SunGard alone can provide. That’s what a Software Ecosystem can do!
The SGHE Community Source beta will mature to general availability in April this year, and is expected to spread very quickly across the Higher Ed market given the early participation we’ve seen in the very limited Proof of Concept. Collaborative workgroups will grow through the ecosystem where client developers can share non-baseline code and collaborate around various extensions, adding further wisdom to the crowd.
Any ecosystem that enables the wisdom of a crowd to formulate tangible value is a system that shortens the distance between the needs and consumed solutions. Software ecosystems will take us there, and it’s a blast to see this level of collaboration at work for the benefit of a whole industry.