Partner ecosystems in enterprise software: cause and effect of the business model from vendor, partner and customer perspectives
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2017
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Mcode
Degree programme
Information and Service Management (ISM)
Language
en
Pages
83
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Abstract
“A Software Ecosystem” is an economic ecosystem that forms around one specific software vendor. As the software industry changes rapidly, research presented earlier shows, that the success of a software is not only defined by its own success but by the success of its ecosystem.” (Popp & Meyer, 2010, s. 131) In most cases, a software ecosystem formulates over time around one large, global organization. The vendor enables other companies to engage in co-operation with it, resell its product portfolio to customers or complement their own offerings with the organization’s product or service portfolio. In large software ecosystems, there are multiple types of third-party organizations engaging the vendor and acting between it and the end customers. Different types of third party organizations aim to bring value to the ecosystem in different ways, according to business strategies they have chosen. The most common types of third party entities in enterprise software ecosystems are Value-added resellers (VARs), Value-added distributors (VADs), System Integrators (SIs) and independent technology consultants. The purpose of the ecosystem is to act as an environment that enables all parties in the ecosystem to benefit from each other’s existence and create value that could not be captured as efficiently, if at all, without the ecosystem and the external entities as parts of it. The most common goals the software vendors pursue with the ecosystem strategy can be further subcategorized into three main sub-goals; financial goals including cost-cutting and monetization, product leadership related goals through open co-innovation, and finally network effect related goals that can be achieved in the market. Although strategic partnerships complicate the business especially since the third parties might represent multiple competing technology vendors, they have been successfully utilized in almost every major industry, including enterprise software. In general, software ecosystems enable increasing value to existing end users, increasing attractiveness to new users, sharing the efforts of product innovation between the partners and increasing lock-in effect among the global clientele. Additionally, the partners enable physical presence in more local markets without expanding the vendor’s own customer facing sales personnel to uncontrollable numbers.Description
Thesis advisor
Rossi, MattiKeywords
software, vendor, ecosystem, partner, value-added reseller, value-added distributor, system integrator