The power of platform — Retail Technology Innovation Hub

Marketing acumen in the digital age demands a dynamic approach to keeping your customers more than satisfied. As their expectations evolve, traditional marketing strategies are becoming outdated, and organisations must adapt to stay relevant. In this market, a product driven platform that meets your goals can be the key to success, says Thekkepat Harish Madhavan.

Consider the fruit seller’s problem

This analogy of a fruit seller illustrates the problem of lost opportunities. Imagine the case of Otto, a fruit trader selling oranges in the open market. Two buyers approach Otto, to negotiate and make their deals.

The first buyer offers $125 per box of oranges, but Otto refuses to sell. The second buyer offers $150 per box of oranges. Otto again refuses to sell, because he was expecting to get $200 per box. In this example, who loses? All three parties lost, since no deal was completed.

But if Otto had inquired about what each buyer needed, he could have changed the outcome. He would have learned that the first buyer needed  the orange pulp and the second buyer needed the orange peel.

With the right tools, Otto could have worked together with both buyers, to understand their expectations in detail, and then used his skillset to peel the oranges – so buyer one can get the pulp and buyer two can get the peel.

In this scenario, everybody wins: Otto meets both buyers’ needs and achieves the desired result, including his optimal price.  

Now assume that Otto is your organisation and the buyers are your clients, who each have specific demands and budgets. If your organisation offers customised products that help drive each client’s business, your clients will be happy and  your organisation will be successful.

The power of a product-driven platform gives you the tools to overcome today’s challenges by tailoring products – such as developing services build-outs, automating processes, designing custom software applications, or creating business specific lead generation systems – to meet your clients’ current and future needs, and thereby achieve positive outcomes for all stakeholders.

A platform is a product that serves or enables other products or services.

Platforms (in the context of digital business) exist at many levels. In simple terms, a platform is a group of programs and functions in applications that are used as a base upon which other applications, processes, or technologies are developed.

Platforms have long been popular with software developers, as they tend to solve multiple problems in a single process. With seamless design, many clients are unaware that their custom solutions are in fact part of a larger platform solution that, if used well, offers high potential for growth.

Part of this potential derives from how adaptable platforms are to new innovations, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

By integrating these types of tools, companies can leverage the power of platform to solve even more challenges, such as the ability to create personalised videos for an organisation’s employees or marketing purposes, or enhance search features.  

Platforms also provide advantageous solutions to four common business challenges that are currently impacting organisations across diverse sectors, such as marketing, information technology (IT), finance, and healthcare.

Despite their differences, businesses in these industries are all seeking to solve for problems related to rapid development, scalability, interoperability, and maintenance/updates.

In today’s fast-paced technological landscape, the array of applications that can be deployed with a platform model help organisations overcome these hurdles, innovate quickly, and stay competitive.

For example, pre-built modules and components, reusable code, integrated development environments (IDEs), automated workflows, and DevOps practices can all accelerate rapid development and reduce time-to-market.

Microservices architecture, database scalability services, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) enable platform-driven applications to ensure reliability while handling increasing data volumes and user loads.

Standardisation, API gateways and design best practices, data integration platforms, service oriented architecture (SOA), middleware, message brokers, and standards compliance/certification can address interoperability issues.

Furthermore, platform applications can minimise the user and operations disruptions associated with maintenance and updates by employing strategies such as automated dependency management, incremental updates, monitoring and alert systems, and processes for versioning and change management.

Leveraging any or all of these approaches provides an efficient pathway to better performance and reliability.

The platform model offers many advantages, as compared to traditional strategies. These include:

1.        Reduced development time, which results in faster speed-to-market and cost savings

2.        Less manual testing and reduced error rates

3.        The ability to innovate and build new functionality faster

4.        Integration with any other technology

5.        Scalable solutions that adapt to changing needs

6.        Increased efficiency with reusable solutions