Building an ecosystem helps businesses accelerate growth and cultivate customer loyalty, whatever their position is in the supply chain. In this uncertain market, as businesses strive to stay agile and reach new audiences while they navigate supply chain and inventory challenges, interest in digital ecosystems has grown significantly.
The question is; how do organisations develop their digital ecosystems?
Simplify the process
The value of the ecosystem is that it simplifies connections between partners through a centralised point. No single stakeholder needs to own or operate all components of the system, which means this network of partners, from vendors and distributors to resellers, offers combined value. Businesses are increasingly behaving like regular online consumers, and expect an omnichannel experience in their B2B purchasing journeys, where they can view product information and analyse activities across all channels through one source.
More and more business customers also want simple, subscription-based solutions. The subscription or pay-per-use models not only offer recurring revenue, they enable the provider to know their customers better, and enhance customer experiences. Along with improving efficiencies in billing, providers with visibility of their customers’ usage can work closely with them to proactively solve challenges and anticipate their future needs.
As a result of this evolution, channel providers like managed service providers (MSPs) are transforming to better meet the world’s digital-first expectations, and are increasingly adopting an ecosystem mentality.
Capitalising on the digital marketplace opportunity
Businesses should look at joining an ecosystem that already houses their target audience. Successful ecosystem partners are refining their services and offering to maximize ROI, optimize speed-to-value, and exploring new revenue streams.
For companies both large and small seeking to build their ecosystems, there’s value in looking for a third-party software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, that incorporates an ecosystem that enables businesses to extend their reach into multiple marketplaces. A robust SaaS platform offers an integrated solution that allows companies to reinvent the way they do business, without breaking their business model. This frees companies, and their customers, from the limitations of ownership, as they embrace the flexibility of the usage-based subscription model.
As a recent report fromGartnerpoints out, it’s vital to obtain buy-in from the C-level before initiating marketplace projects, as well as making the most of the marketplace operators’ experience by enabling them to manage the process entirely.
As a recent report from
Gartner
points out, it’s vital to obtain buy-in from the C-level before initiating marketplace projects, as well as making the most of the marketplace operators’ experience by enabling them to manage the process entirely.
Vendor ecosystems consist of hardware, software, subscription services and products. The digital marketplace can be ‘as-a-service', providing vendor and catalogue management, the handling of subscription and billing, and manage multi-level channel partner management. This is application programming interface (API) to API communication. Then there’s the go to market (GTM) ecosystem that oversee the marketplaces – home grown or third-party.
Companies whose dominant business models are ecosystem driven, experienced revenue growth approximately27 percent higherthan the average for their industries, and had profit margins 20 percent above their industry average.
Companies whose dominant business models are ecosystem driven, experienced revenue growth approximately
27 percent higher
than the average for their industries, and had profit margins 20 percent above their industry average.
How to manage a successful ecosystem
A SaaS platform enables its users to work in real time with the transactions generated between distributors, resellers, and customers. By automating processes with business partners, a SaaS platform helps to increase both the productivity, and reliability, of an organisation. It’s possible to build, test, run and manage this service without the need for an infrastructure.
Ecosystem orchestration allows partners to easily exchange, combine and monetise their services. The ecosystem orchestrator defines the blueprint, which is the foundation for managing end-to-end solution delivery through the digital ecosystem. Partners are also able to introduce new digital offerings at speed, sell joint offerings and create new business models.
Partners can define revenue sharing and flexible partner settlement agreements for selling their services through ecosystem partners, and managing relationships with business partners.
Time is running out, so act now
With technology constantly evolving, time is of the essence to build a digital ecosystem. The ability to quickly partner with new vendors, maintain an ever-changing product catalogue, and track usage and billing for complex bundles is business-critical. In the race to recurring revenue, it is the responsibility of providers to act and strategically transform their operations, centralise processes and adopt automation to keep abreast with product demand and service delivery.
But perfecting an ecosystem approach is by no means easy, and building an ecosystem from scratch takes time. Channel providers often struggle with their strategic intent and goals for the ecosystem. What is the vision? What are the innovation opportunities? Ecosystems require new mindsets and resource allocation.
Organisations that wait too long to act risk being left behind. That’s why a third-party Saas platform, with a pre-existing catalogue enables businesses to build their ecosystems and scale at a faster rate. The more that providers can lean upon customer partnerships to enhance a product’s offering or service choice - from cybersecurity to cloud infrastructure, application development to the digital workplace - the more chance they have of increasing annual recurring revenue (ARPU) per customer, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
Ecosystems thrive because their members can communicate and transfer data across interconnected networks. A managed marketplace platform takes the complexity out of building ecosystems and distributing subscription-based solutions. SaaS technology connects all these systems and choreographs the data flow between them.