- By Fred Johannessen, Technology Alliance Program and Market Zone

I ran into Kash Noorani an Architect of our Dashboards and we got talking about ecosystem - since I describe my job as building the inbound ecosystem. We were discussing the importance of having developers build integrations and innovations on our platforms such as CMDB, AR, and, of course our dashboards. He pointed me to the funny yet scary "Developers,   developers, developers" rant by Steve Ballmer. It brings a realization that what makes a vibrant and lasting ecosystem for a software platform is the developer community. They are the source of innovation that extends the platform solution into new technology areas. An example of this is Aeroprise, and BMC development partner that extends our Remedy applications into mobile devices. They also can extend solutions into vertical markets such as TuringSMI and the Telco/eTOM solutions they provide. And, of course, these developers help grow the market, thus the pie for all of us while providing greater value to our mutual customers. The integrations and extensions aren't limited to commercial ISV software, but include "toolkit" source and binaries that help customers perform a specific task, and also open source software. There is no reason that a complete solution for a customer cannot or would not include all such components, in fact, a credible ecosystem strategy must include all of them.

Such a strategy requires an infrastructure that narrows the distance between the platform provider and the developer community to the point where there is near seamless interaction with all elements of the ecosystem - joining customers, developers, and the solution provider into one dynamic bazaar. I think this is where ISV's can learn a lot from the open source community...