Software platforms & ecosystems

Dan Farber: I'm Dan Farber, Editor-in-Chief at ZDNet, and I'm going to be talking about software in terms of platforms and ecosystems.

A platform is basically the core services software infrastructure that delivers applications. An ecosystem would be all those components and processes, resellers, developers, evangelists, and anyone who's participating in a platform and trying to get some benefit from it. Hopefully, when you have platforms and ecosystems, it's mutually beneficial.

It's 2007 and there is a big platform battle going on, especially in enterprise, where you have all these stacks being developed by these big companies. There's nothing new about platforms or ecosystems, other than using the terms in place of other terms we used to use in the past, which would be "ownership, " or something like that. The IBM mainframe stack, Intel has it's processor stack, UNIX, lots of ecosystems around UNIX, and Apple has an ecosystem and platform, and of course Windows, huge, so nothing new there.

What is new is that until a few years ago, putting together a stack meant assembling all kinds of parts from different people, which made it more costly, more complex. Now we're moving to this point, where the idea is, rather than assemble parts from all these different players, we have these big players trying to assemble all the parts for you; almost to prefabricate a stack for you. Let's look at some of these players and see what they have.

Microsoft. They have lots of apps. They have a database, SQL Server, they have middleware, they have their operating system. They've got the whole stack, but in the enterprise, they still have a ways to go to gain credibility, but moving fast.

Oracle. Lots of applications. They went through a binge of spending, about $20 billion dollars, to roll up all these applications. They obviously have a leading database. They have Fusion middleware. Operating system, primarily use Linux. I think as we'll find out over time that the operating system itself is going to be less important, especially as we move to more web-based applications.

Now SAP, making a big move with its NetWeaver, trying to get developers to get on board and crank out applications with their middleware. Operating system neutral, database neutral.

Sun has been putting together an open-source stack, staring with Solaris 10. They have middleware. Database they don't really have, but they can use any open-source database or any of these others databases. And applications, tons of UNIX applications.

HP kind of got out of the software business. So when you go down their list, apps, they really don't have. Database they don't have. They have middleware, management software, operating system, no, not really.

In the case of IBM, going from the mainframe to UNIX to Linux, they don't have an operating system in terms of the kinds of operating systems we've been talking about here, but obviously they're a big RedHat shop, a Linux shop. They have middleware with their WebSphere; database, DB2 so they have that as well. Applications, they really haven't been in the applications business and in the ERP applications business.

I added one more here, which is SalesForce.com. A small company, half a billion dollars, compared to these billion dollars of companies. And what they have is lots of apps. 500 apps in their App Exchange. Small apps, not a huge business, but I think it's more of what's to come. The big game here, and obviously the database they use is Oracle, they don't have their own; so middleware they have some. OS neutral because then the browser. The big game here is to attract developers, and if you don't have lots of users on your system, you're not going to attract lots of developers.

So the battleground for 2007 is who can get the developers to build on top of their platform, and to participate in their ecosystem. As we look down this list, it's not clear who the big winner is going to be, but certainly there's going to be a rush to cover more territory to expand their stacks. Even if they don't own a piece, such as the database or the operating system, it's very swappable. It's a matter of delivering it in a way that's almost self-service. Software as a service.