Platform Vendor Overview
Many platform vendors struggle with accelerating ISV technology adoption and scaling their reach to increasing numbers of development partners. Manual compliance and certification programs are tedious, expensive and time-consuming, slowing platform adoption and application delivery. Confusion about how to adopt new platform vendor technology can result in ISV reluctance to innovate on the platform. This can negatively impact platform vendor sales and market share. Perhaps worst of all, platform vendors lack clear visibility and insight into these adoption obstacles, and have little information for strategic decision making.
These challenges are as true for emerging platform vendors (who are primarily focused on hardening their platform) as they are for more mature vendors (who are looking for ways to service the long tail of their developer community). Invariably, platform vendors find themselves operating in a complex partner ecosystem.
Software / Server Platforms
The pain of application certification has existed in the desktop and server market for some time. Both software and server platform vendors need to understand how developers are deploying their technology, and they must find efficient ways to drive ISV adoption of specific platform features. Benchmarking these partner applications to compliance and certification metrics has become an effective way to do this, but until now the supporting business processes have been predominantly manual. + Learn More
Mobile Platforms
In the emerging mobile platform market, the Apple App Store provides a recent illustration where platform dominance has translated into a developer community scrambling in mass to capture early market share where there is an abundance of unmet needs and relatively low competitive pricing pressure. This mobile market phenomenon has increased the size and scope of the compliance management problem by orders of magnitude due to the proliferation of applications, devices, and even newer mobile platforms that are now emerging to service the excess demand. + Learn More
The overall pace of technology innovation has accelerated over the past few years, powered by faster and smarter technologies. To help platform vendors operate in this environment of rapid change, SpikeSource has developed a new process to automate platform compliance, enabling platform vendors to substantially accelerate platform adoption and scale their developer ecosystem.
SpikeSource Platform Ecosystem Management defines a new industry standard for automated software certification, uniquely addressing the needs of platform vendors. By automating the process of assembling, testing, validating and remediating software compliance issues, SpikeSource transforms inefficient, disjointed and manual ISV recruitment and enablement processes into a two-way, collaborative workflow. SpikeSource supports any application on any platform -- open source, closed source; web-based, binaries; server, desktop, mobile, appliances, etc. – providing ongoing solution analysis, vulnerability assessments, prescriptive guidance and remediation.
SpikeSource's unique “application fingerprinting” technology provides the platform vendor with a highly precise view of the technology components embedded in specific applications and across the entire developer ecosystem. SpikeSource uses this data to deliver unprecedented decision support intelligence, enabling platform vendors to promote key technologies, target specific messages to developers based upon their application profile, evaluate update of remediation and recommendation instructions, and gauge the effectiveness of various programs.
The net result for platform vendors: Enhanced brand reputation, lower developer support costs and increased market share. Developers also enjoy high-value benefits through significantly simplified compliance processes that take less time and resource to complete, while ensuring they continually deliver trusted applications.
