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Discover the Building Blocks of a Unified Ecosystem

Leveraging hyper-scale technology platforms to enhance the value of services.

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  • Businesses struggle to leverage a connected ecosystem to the rising demand of a growing customer base to satisfy inter-connected needs in one integrated experience.
  • Building and scaling in the ecosystem are more complex with effective communications, collaboration, and integration with suppliers, partners, hyper-scale technology platforms, and secure capabilities to remain competitive.
  • Ecosystem requires a superior tech stack with unified convergence of capabilities like consumer touch-point channels, partner infrastructure, and hyper-scalable technology platforms to provide customers with integrated services.
  • Enterprises need a fully integrated strategy to address evolving, emerging ecosystem needs.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Leading ecosystem(s) originated through dominant technology companies, which have leveraged hyper-scale platforms to compete with the offerings of competitors by controlling customer touchpoints such as search, live media streaming, advertising, and recommendations. Businesses must take advantage of the platforms by creating new highly profitable product and service categories with greater digitization and technology collaboration to enable end-to-end accessibility for consumers and their partners in the connected ecosystem.

Impact and Result

  • Identify opportunities across your ecosystem to capitalize on the suppliers, manufacturers, logistics providers, competitors, and other partners to monetize key customer insights.
  • Realize the effects of the unified collaboration that are being felt on all business entities of the open scale and emerging ecosystem.
  • Discover how the best-in-class businesses are already reaping business benefits from leveraging hyper-scale technology platforms in a unified ecosystem.
  • Envision consumer, services, operations, and technology foundational components in unison for your enterprise to design a collaborative list of cost and competitive initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.

Discover the Building Blocks of a Unified Ecosystem Research & Tools

1. Discover the Building Blocks of a Unified Ecosystem - Identify opportunities across your ecosystem to capitalize on the suppliers, manufacturers, logistics providers, competitors, and other partners to monetize key customer insights.

This research will help envision consumer, services, operations, and technology foundational components in unison for your business to design a collaborative list of cost and competitive initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.

Unlock a Free Sample

Discover the Building Blocks of a Unified Ecosystem

Leveraging hyper-scale technology platform(s) to enhance the value of service(s).

Analyst Perspective

Envision building the foundation for a new connected and efficient ecosystem.

Rahul Jaiswal

Ecosystems usually begin by unifying a robust set of consumer services like an online social network, online to offline commerce, live-streaming, gamification, booking, and payment services in a particular platform or app. Plugging into an ecosystem offers businesses many hard-to-build capabilities, from powerful customer data insights to vast logistics associations to cloud services. This is a compelling and capital-light route for developing and scaling their specific abilities.

Businesses must take advantage of these plug-and-play, one-stop-shop platforms by creating new highly profitable product and service categories with greater digitization and technology collaboration to enable end-to-end accessibility for consumers and their partners in the connected ecosystem.

Rahul Jaiswal
Principal Research Director, Retail
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

Businesses struggle to leverage a connected ecosystem to the rising demand of a growing customer base to satisfy inter-connected needs in one integrated experience.

Building and scaling in the ecosystem are more complex, including effective communications, collaboration, and integration with suppliers, partners, hyper-scale technology platforms, and secure capabilities to remain competitive.

Ecosystem requires a superior tech stack with unified convergence of capabilities like consumer touch point channels, partner infrastructure, and hyper-scalable technology platforms to provide customers with integrated services.

Enterprises need a fully integrated strategy to address evolving emerging ecosystem needs.

Retail and wholesale businesses underestimate the eminence of the ecosystem to explore the opportunities for ‘quick wins’ with peers and ICT (Information & communication technology) innovation hubs.

Most businesses oppose establishing collaborations and securing key competency drivers associated with building and scaling in the ecosystem.

Business teams struggle to assess partner alliances. Line of business (LOBs) teams do not take a structured approach to interconnecting sets of products and services with the hyper-scale technology platform partners.

Most retail brands seek to adopt a well-crafted strategy in hyper-scale technology deployment to play an active role in the customer-centric ecosystem.

Identify opportunities across your ecosystem to capitalize on the suppliers, manufacturers, logistics providers, competitors, and other partners to monetize key customer insights.

Realize the effects of the unified collaboration that are being felt on all business entities of the open scale and emerging retail ecosystem.

Discover how the best-in-class retailers are reaping business benefits from adopting hyper-scale technology demands with the omnichannel retail framework.

Envision consumer, services, operations, and technology foundational components in unison for your enterprise to design a collaborative list of cost and competitive initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.

Info-Tech Insight

Leading ecosystem(s) originated through dominant technology companies, which have leveraged hyper-scale platforms to compete with the offerings of customary competitors by controlling customer touchpoints such as search, live media streaming, advertising, and recommendations. Businesses must take advantage of the platforms by creating new highly-profitable product and service categories with greater digitization and technology collaboration to enable end-to-end accessibility for consumers and their partners in the connected ecosystem.

The ecosystem provides a scalable platform for businesses to deliver a seamless customer experience

The image contains a screenshot a diagram of an ecosystem scalable platform.
  • Cloud infrastructure services pay-as-you-go grew to $217 billion USD. Amazon leads the worldwide cloud infrastructure market share with 34%, ahead of Microsoft Azure at 21% and Google Cloud at 11%. (Statista, Dec 23, 2022)
  • The Ocado Smart Platform, an automated warehouse solution, streamlines operations. In just five minutes, OSP robotics can complete 50,000 orders. (Forbes, Oct 30, 2020)
  • Alibaba’s live stream-selling platform Taobao Live has nearly 40 million followers. In a 24-hour online sale, the Taobao marketplace posted $7.5 billion in the first 30 minutes.
  • Nike Membership stands out for its wholesale partnership with Dick’s Scorecard. The loyalty integration allows the retailers to team up with 79 million engaged customers and provide consumers with access to exclusive products, experiences and offers. (Footwear News)
  • Amazon’s ecosystem, as of Q2 2020, comprised 200 million Echo devices (in homes), 572 physical stores, a $19 billion digital ad business, 400 private label brands, 43 subsidiaries, a $1.5 billion eSports business, a $40 billion revenue cloud business, blockchain and IoT services, healthcare initiatives (like Care), a $40 billion R&D budget, a few startup investment funds and more, to provide a seamless one-stop-shop experience. (Medium, Jun 2020)
  • Nike’s flagship platform features Nike Run Club and Nike Training Club apps. In addition, the platform aids selling customized sports apparel to offer social events, challenges, and leaderboards provided by the community; and expert guidance, motivational music playlists, and personal training provided by third parties. In 2021, sales of products from Nike’s website and apps totaled $9.1 billion, up from $5.5 billion a year earlier. (HBR, Oct 2022)
  • CPG brands and wholesalers are shifting advertising dollars to social media platforms to leverage retailers’ digital and physical channels to promote their products and make incremental sales as ads are placed closer to the point of purchase. (TechCrunch)

The ecosystem is a unified convergence of capabilities

The ecosystem consists of unified operational technology platforms and services through which customers satisfy inter-connected needs in one integrated experience.

Info-Tech Insight

A precise ecosystem formulation can recreate both scale and address challenging capabilities via partnerships.

The image contains a diagram to demonstrate how an ecosystem in a unified convergence of capabilities.

Leveraging hyper-scale technology platforms to enhance the value of services.

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Author

Rahul Jaiswal

Contributors


  • Rajiv Shankar, Chief Information Officer, REDTAG
  • Naomi Jackson, Chief Financial Officer, Goodwill Industries North Florida
  • Anitha Reddy, Vice President of Software Engineering, Qurate Retail Group
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