If you are in a position where you make choices about your company's technology, then a critical decision you have to make is how technology will be leveraged across the business. Regardless of the business you are in, the technology platforms you choose to build your business on will have a profound effect on if you succeed in the marketplace.

What is a Platform?

The American Heritage Dictionary states a platform is, "The basic technology of a computer system's hardware and software that defines how a computer is operated and determines what other kinds of software can be used."

A platform essentially acts as an assumed capability in your business that other systems, people or processes can leverage in different ways. What makes it different from just a normal piece of technology is that it is something that can be built upon and most likely was design to do so. You'll see words like "scalable", "open architecture" and "extensible" when someone is trying to sell you a platform and not just a single focused component. This is where companies such as SAP for financials, or Apache for Web Serving come into play. By themselves, they don't do much but when you link them with databases or other components, they glue together other technologies to offer unique services.

Furthermore, by utilizing multiple independent platforms together, they form a broader capability than just using one platform alone. Most businesses will require many platforms to be successful, such as communication platforms, payment platform, human resource platforms, et cetera.

Technology components that are stove piped, such as a typical installation of Microsoft Word, aren't going to be a platform for your company because Word doesn't glue capabilities together. It may be a platform from Microsoft's point of view because it created a document format that made it difficult for other technology companies to work with and this created a "pain to change" issue for customers, but that isn't something your company is probably going to leverage. Microsoft on the other hand could easily build off that leverage.

If you build products, life may be harder

For Openvista, which is being built from the ground up to be a platform for others to work off of, one of the challenges of bringing up a next generation product is that the we have to determine both the platforms we want to offer and the platforms we want to leverage. There are no internal pre-defined decisions and no pre-defined capabilities that we were forced to live with or compromise with. This contrasts sharply with our consulting business, where the businesses or governments we work with have been doing business a certain way for a long time and have existing platforms that they want leveraged or interfaced with.

For example, one of our large Fortune 100 customers wanted to glue together their existing Human Resources system, and their badging systems so that they had better control over access to their numerous buildings for security reasons. Our consulting group was involved in designing both part of the badging system and the glue system that would link HR and the badging system. In the process of understanding the requirements from our customer, we had to learn about the HR system's interfaces (how we would communicate with it) and the badging system's capabilities and limitations to work with that other system. Because both systems already existed and were written mostly by other vendors, we were constrained by those platforms in terms of the choices of how to glue them together. But in most cases, that actually makes things easier since it limits the number of options we have to think through.

However, for Openvista, we have nearly unlimited options in how to build the platform. Even more importantly, a major driver on how our platform is developed is how we try to fulfill the perceived needs of our customers. Thus, if we choose the wrong platforms to rely on or design, these limitations could ultimately strangle our capabilities. What this means is that we have a broad mandate internally to research a wide array of technologies, processes and techniques to meet our platform objectives.

We have to look at a broad array of questions:

- How will people use the platform day to day?
- What are the extreme cases?
- What architectural components and technologies are required to meet initial and long-term demand?
- What happens if we grow faster than expected or slower?
- How do we want to generate revenue?
- What are competitors doing in the space?
- What is the Human Capital required build and maintain the platforms?

And those were just starting points as we began to develop the idea of Openvista into the platform. As we answered each of those questions we started to select how we would ultimately build our product platform. By the very act of those choices we also got a host of equally important constraints on the design of the system and its growth. As long as the constraints do not limit the maximum capabilities required to meet our maximum objectives or are designed to "fail up," so that as parts of the system fail to meet customer or service requirements, we can replace them with parts that do meet those requirements, we have designed a proper system.

It's always about the customers

How can you be smarter than your competitors about your platform choices?

A great way is to offer some subset of potential users access to your products and see what they think and how your product behaves. In the process, you are likely going to see effects on the system you never would have tested and behaviors from users that you would never guess they would do. It will help you determine if you are on the right track with your platform choices before you have spent all your resources and time for a grand launch only to find out your internal testing missed major interactions with your product that are causing problems. It will also provide information that will be valuable data to help refine your platform choices once you determine that the platforms can serve as a basis for your product or service.

And if you didn't guess it, that's why Openvista.com is open a year before the official launch. As we continue to open up the service to those of you that have signed up as well as to select users, you will help shape the product to make it better for your own use. It's a symbiotic relationship that we believe all product and services companies should have with their users.

Note: This entry was updated on 9/25/08.