The Evolving Partner Ecosystem
Importantly, this agility fosters extensibility of the application as well, initiating a new approach towards hyper-innovation as the consumption of services-based value add improvements can be vetted, subscribed to, and maintained without overhead or risk. This will in turn usher in a more hyper-connected, dynamic, innovative culture and environment up and down the supply chain.
Personalized services will play a critical role in bringing scale across industries that help their customers consume and benefit from these advances. As cloud platforms, vendors, and specialized services providers test the boundaries of their ability to maintain complex solutions and add personalized capabilities in this ecosystem, a new landscape will emerge.
Cloud platform diagnostics and optimization tools will become intertwined with vendor development strategies. ERP and best of suite vendors will transition towards platforms where a comprehensive supply chain data model can be exposed for valuable insights and real time optimization.
SaaS providers will drive personalization into their offerings, while best of breed vendors will deliver robust upgrade validation capabilities and toolsets.
Specialized services providers will increasingly expand beyond support models to offer business process outsourcing like services – extending standard templates provided by the core solution vendors with an eye towards upgradeability, and delivering innovations on top of these templates for industry or customer specific use cases not yet addressed by the core solutions providers.
A deep familiarity with the industry solutions will differentiate these vendors both through their support levels, their ability to vet updates at scale, and the focused attention on margin attainment for their client base.
A successful partnership will allow them to drive continuous improvement and encourage them to experiment and measure impacts, while an extended customer base provide them a market allowing them to scale investments in innovative solutions.In this modern, digital ecosystem, these solutions will be available for rapid consumption, likely to be positioned as a subscription where the ROI can be measured and reported out to justify continued investment.
