To answer the question in the headline, let’s first start with the basics: what is a software platform in general?
“A platform is a set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources that helps you to grow your business. A platform enables growth through connection: its value comes not only from its own features, but from its ability to connect external tools, teams, data, and processes.
With a platform as the foundation of your business ecosystem, you don’t have to limit yourself to one suite of products — you can add and subtract new applications and tools as your business grows and changes, without having to start from scratch again or deal with messy migrations.”
Before you think about making any investments, you should think about the complete architecture and set of tools you’ll use to power your business. What is needed now, and how do I ensure that I meet all future needs that I don’t even know about yet? Finding tools that can accomplish all your distinct needs can be challenging but finding tools that can also communicate and talk with each other can be downright overwhelming.
On a high-level, you have two options:
In other words: a product suite is something fixed that aims to sort out most of the challenges you can distinguish right now. It’s a tool from one company that comes in one package. Everything within that package is designed to work together, but it can be challenging to add new tools that didn’t originally come with it. A platform is something that connects many software tools under one umbrella with all your tools from different providers to help you create an ecosystem that not only solves your most challenging problems but adapts to future unknown needs as well. Even though a product suite seems like a simple and easy option, it does come with some trade-offs:
“Almost every product today has APIs that let it exchange data with other applications. A platform, however, plays a more active role in coordinating how multiple products work together. You can picture a platform as a hub, with spokes connecting other products to its center. The hub binds those disparate products together and orchestrates them in a common mission. A platform creates a stable center of gravity for your tech stack.”
In other words, a platform is smart: it doesn’t try to do everything itself, but instead provides a foundation on which many other more specialized products can be stacked. To an untrained eye, a platform may initially appear to be suite-like, as they both provide a wide collection of features out of the box. Typically, a platform has one primary purpose, something that can serve as a foundational service or master data repository that other software and services can leverage. Unlike a closed suite, a platform is inherently open, making it available for partnerships with companies that may not even exist yet.
Here are some questions to think about when choosing a platform for your company:
Fliq Platform provides the best of two worlds: complete products and features needed for building world class smart manufacturing processes with short ROI and fast ramp-up, and the no lock in -philosophy, which makes it easily possible to integrate third parties and collect information from different databases or develop completely new solutions on the platform through open interfaces. The platform already supports over 250 different data transmission protocols and complies also to changes and challenges in the future.
FLIQ Platform combines the most developed data visualization on the market, easy-to-use tools to make everyday operations more efficient, artificial intelligence, and top-quality wireless IoT solutions. Our platform has received credit for its usability, as it can solve just the challenges that create the most common bottlenecks and losses in factories. We combine all efficient production systems under the same platform, removing silos.
Interested to know more about FLIQ Platform? Click here: Fliq Platform
Sources:
What Is a Software Platform & How Is It Different From a Product?
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/software-platform Written by Emilie Nøss Wangen