VoIP Business and Virtual PBX
Business

Data is the new platform

And, if the data is becoming so valuable, at the time analyzing and mining it ought to provide incremental revenue streams beyond the traditional product-based business model. Nevertheless consider going one step furthermore: If treated right, access to enough quality data would be valuable to others outside of your enterprise too – assuming the correct federation and business models were constructed.

This accretion of value around large data sets – particularly alongside an external ecosystem – is analogous to what we’re familiar with in the product world: The Platform. In fact, we may find that absolutely new business models based on data platforms may arise from legacy product companies.

The traditional world

In the traditional world, the platform is a piece of core innovation and/or IP that third-parties write to or build upon, frequently using APIs. The platform helps form a market with value and inertia that attracts third-parties to provide complementary solutions. In turn, the ecosystem of third-party products is made more valuable because they are associated with a platform.

To get your juices flowing about creating a data platform business of your own, consider the following data attributes you may already be developing:

In closing, the coming age of big data isn’t just about storing and analyzing lots of bits. It’s about extending the core business models to leverage IP stored-up in your data, and creating new partner ecosystems – and data supply chains – to create moreover value for your enterprise. That’s just where the fun starts.

Ken Oestreich is a marketing veteran helping develop new categories in the Enterprise IT, Data Center, and cloud computing spaces. He has held product- and corporate marketing roles with Sun, Cassatt, Egenera, and EMC. Find him on twitter as @fountnhead.

The evolution you highlight will create some interesting business models hereafter. Will we only see an evolution of “inbound” large data islands that aggregate massive amounts of isolated data, or “outbound” data islands that open to their data to others, or will we potentially see someone that can figure out how to make money with both “inbound” and “outbound” data models, simultaneously?

Tags:
More information: Gigaom
References:
  • ·

    Define Extending The Core Business Models To Lever