Discover the Building Blocks of a Unified Ecosystem
Leveraging hyper-scale technology platforms to enhance the value of services.
- 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.
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.
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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 |
Executive Summary
Your Challenge |
Common Obstacles |
Info-Tech’s Approach |
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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, 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
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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.
An ecosystem has four critical dimensions
Info-Tech Insight
Plugging into a unified 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.
Source: Info-Tech Research Group Analysis
Ecosystem(s) will shift revenue sources
*Digital goods and services includes games, video and music streaming, e-books and audiobooks, news and magazines, dating apps, fitness, photo and video editing and enterprise and education. Estimated sales and billings from digital goods and services is not the same as total App Store billings.
Source: Statista June 2020; Analysis Group; Apple” How Large is the Apple App Store Ecosystem”; ID 1155494
Awareness and readiness
The Apple App Store's ecosystem facilitated approximately 519 billion U.S. dollars worth of global billings and sales via its ecosystem.
- The essential categories were goods and services, with the general retail vertical generating $268 billion USD worth of m-commerce sales via iOS apps.
- Diversifying in ways such as through digital goods and services that create new revenue from their current assets, comprising travel, ride-sharing, food delivery, digital payments, in-app advertising, gaming, and untapped advertising channels on apps and websites, will prevail.
- The future is omnichannel, and businesses must push the boundaries with partners to potentially realize the shifts in revenue sources.
Beyond trade network
Info-Tech Insight
Businesses will branch out in new ways, such as through services and new functions that extract additional revenue.
Leading ecosystems players leverage dominant technology platforms
The world’s top seven companies are ecosystem companies.
Source: S&P Capital IQ; McKinsey, 2020
Awareness and readiness
Ecosystems consist of connected services through which customers satisfy inter-connected needs in one integrated experience. A precise ecosystem formulation can recreate scale and address challenging capabilities via partnerships.
Leading ecosystems came into existence through dominant technology companies, which have leveraged hyper-scale platforms to compete with the offerings of traditional competitors by controlling customer user interfaces and touchpoints such as search, media, advertising, and messaging.
Brands can take advantage by entering their new product and service categories with a higher level of profitability, as digitization and technology today enable end-to-end accessibility for consumers and their partners in the connected ecosystem.
Ecosystems provide opportunities for hyper-scalable commerce platforms
1. Apple
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2. Saudi Aramco
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3. Microsoft
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4. Amazon
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(Bain & Company, Jan. 25, 2023)
Awareness and readiness
Amazon is a leading example of the retail ecosystem in North America. Amazon’s revenue from the first quarter of 2022 to the third quarter, without Amazon Web Services, came from activities “beyond the trade network.”
A major factor in Amazon’s triumph is its ecosystem’s increasing power—an extensive structure of integrated offerings that creates value for all stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, communities, and shareholders) while strengthening and expanding the traditional business. Moreover, these offerings stretch beyond conventional trade.
Its Prime membership, far-reaching third-party (3P) marketplace, and Prime Video offerings are the most evident parts of its ecosystem. Still, numerous other offerings empower its broad approach, including logistics services like Amazon Relay, warehousing & distribution, and additional services like Amazon Pay and Amazon Ads.
Ecosystems provide a competitive edge and new revenue streams
5. Google
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6. Meta
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7. Alibaba
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Awareness and readiness
Alibaba has developed into the world's most significant commerce business in gross merchandise value. With a GMV of RMB 7.5 trillion generated from its China retail commerce marketplaces and a total GMV of RMB 8.12 trillion (approx.1.17 trillion USD) created from the Alibaba ecosystem during fiscal 2021.
Even though Alibaba is generally known for its success in Chinese retail commerce,
- The Group's ecosystem also comprises a wholesale business segment (which is what Alibaba started with at the outset).
- It has intercontinental e-commerce platforms outside China (i.e. southeast Asia's Lazada, south Asia's Daraz, and Turkey's Trendyol),
- It is an industry-leading cloud computing business.
- Accomplished digital media, entertainment, and other initiatives.
Businesses will need to leverage the hyper-scale AIaaS-based ecosystem
Hyper-scale ecosystem platform
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Ecosystem platforms will deliver on-demand services to businesses and enterprises to install, develop, train, and manage AI-driven service models. Hyper-scale stack possibly will be distributed into a layer, organized as follows:
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IT departments can drive better efficiency and cost-saving outcomes
The maturity level skews lower. Slightly more than half of CIOs using Info-Tech's CEO-CIO Alignment Program rated themselves at a support level of maturity in 2022. That aligns with IT professionals' view of their organizations from our Tech Trends and Priorities Survey, where organizations are rated at the support level, on average. At this level, IT departments can provide reliable infrastructure and support a responsive IT service desk that reasonably satisfies stakeholders. It is concerning that nearly one quarter consider their maturity as struggling.
CIOs want to be transformative. CIOs aspire to attain the transform level of maturity. Nearly half of the CIOs select this future state in our diagnostic, indicating a desire to deliver reliable innovation and lead the organization to become a technology-driven firm. However, fewer CxOs aspire to that level of maturity in IT. CxOs are more likely than CIOs to say that IT should aim for the optimize level of maturity. IT will help other departments become more efficient and achieve lower costs at this level.
Most CIOs should move toward short-term optimization. IT maturity is achieved one step at a time. Aiming for outcomes at the optimize level will be a realistic goal for most CIOs in 2023 and will satisfy many stakeholders.
Source: Info-Tech CXO-CIO Priorities Report
Current and future state of IT maturity to transform
Businesses can improve the unified end-to-end customer experience
Source: Info-Tech Research Group I InfoTech Core IT Processes
Develop foundational IT mgt. capabilities to mitigate risk
- Data and business intelligence: Embrace standard interfaces; open APIs are the most common path to integrating enterprise systems into ecosystem hyper-scale platforms.
- Infrastructure and operations: Lay the foundations to partner with system integrators. Ecosystem players bring end-to-end solutions to the enterprise and work with systems integrator partners to overcome integration barriers.
- Security and risks: Encrypt data end to end as it flows between IoT devices to safeguard that even if it does leak.
- Maintain governance and compliance: Enterprises’ current approach to creating data lakes and presenting them to platforms should extend to the enterprise ecosystem. Building good controls and anonymizing data in these locations will enable businesses to interact with the new hyper-scale platforms and remain compliant.
Case Study
Central Group’s “The 1” rearchitects loyalty program to accelerate ecosystem integration on AWS to personalize customer experience
Central Group launched The 1, a digital lifestyle and loyalty platform. The platform offers the best experience in line with its “Center of Life” vision for customers’ daily life. Central Group is Thailand’s largest retail conglomerate —The 1 has 19 million members and 32,000 retail touchpoints in its online and offline channels. It also offers recommendations and rewards to members by combining data across eight industries such as travel and commute, working, and dining. |
Solution The1 re-architected its loyalty program on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud in just seven months to obtain on-demand compute resources and elasticity to process omnichannel customer data. Created a data lake for 100 TB of omnichannel data – The 1’s data team created a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service, in which about 100 terabytes of data is currently held. Engineers now handle a 5–10% increase in data volumes each month. And with more data points now processed each day, The 1 can enhance targeting for its loyalty members and provide more customer-focused offers. Timely resource allocation and management – The data lake on AWS is a more efficient means for processing large-scale data with elastic architecture. With an AWS solution, they have the freedom to collect data from any source and the capability to transform data with high performance at a reasonable cost. |
Results They reduced query times from 2 hours to 15 mins. –Marketers run reports efficiently to influence real-time campaigns and deliver timely information to management. 3X faster recommendation engine –Besides more personalized digital lifestyle recommendations, The 1’s loyalty members benefit from a high level of accessibility—averaging 99.99%—on the app. Improved cloud governance and 20% fewer infrastructure costs – AWS continuously improves the platform and provides new services to implement and grow the business with managed services like Amazon EKS and Amazon Personalize. (Sources: Amazon AWS 2023, Central Group) |
Source: Amazon AWS I Central Group
Related Infotech Research
Retail Industry Business Reference Architecture
- Leading organizations require business reference architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and capability maps to design accurate blueprints of retail operations.
- Assess your initiatives and priorities to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct capability assessments to identify opportunities and prioritize projects.
The Wholesale Industry Reference Architecture
- Demonstrate the value of IT’s role in supporting your wholesale distribution capabilities while highlighting the importance of proper alignment between organizational and IT strategies.
- Apply business reference architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and capability maps to design usable and accurate blueprints of your wholesale and distribution operations.
- Every organization should have a zero-trust strategy, and the roadmap to deploy it must always be tested and refined.
- Assess resources and determine zero trust readiness. Prioritize initiatives and build out a roadmap. Deploy zero trust and monitor with zero trust progress metrics.
- Identify opportunities across your shopping journey to capitalize on the blockchain, digital twinning, infrastructure, and virtual environments to monetize key customer insights.
- Learn how the best-in-class retailers are already reaping business benefits from adopting technology demands with the Metaverse Journey Map. Visualize consumer, services, operations, and technology components in unison for your enterprise to design a list of initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.
Related Infotech Research
The Future of Omnichannel Retail – Strategic Trends Report
- Identify: Strategic foresight flows from the identification to clustering the signals.
- Prioritize: Further customize the scores by tailoring the generalized weightings to your organization and determining the relevancy and timing to your operations.
- Align: After establishing what trend and technology to prioritize, establish its benefits that closely align and promote the success of your business’ goals.
Research Contributors
Larry Fretz VP of Industry Research Info-Tech Research Group, USA |
Rob Redford Practice Lead Info-Tech Research Group |
Chris Goodhue Managing Partner, Executive Services Info-Tech Research Group |
Sallie Wright Executive Counselor, Executive Services Info-Tech Research Group |
Naomi Jackson Chief Financial Officer Goodwill Industries South Florida |
Angelica Gomez Vice President of Information Technology Goodwill Industries of South Florida
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Rajiv Shankar Chief Information Officer REDTAG, United Arab Emirates |
Anitha Reddy Vice President of Software Engineering Qurate Retail Group |
Bibliography
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“Central Group’s The 1 Rearchitects Loyalty Program on AWS to Accelerate Analysis and Personalize Customer Experiences.” Amazon AWS. 2022. Web.
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Hancock, Bryan. Kilroy, Tom. Kohli, Sajal. “Automation in retail: An executive overview for getting ready.” McKinsey, 23 May. 2019. Web.
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World Oil Staff. “Aramco launches digital transformation program, signs $7.2 billion in agreements at IKTVA forum.” World Oil, 31 January 2023. Web.
Bishop, Todd. “Microsoft cloud revenue up 22%, Windows business plunges 27% in first report since job cuts.” Geek Wire, 24 January 2023. Web.
Brenner, et al, Dan. “Holiday Recap: Why Retailers Need an Ecosystem Strategy in an Amazon World.” Bain & Company, 25 January 2023. Web.
Boorstin, Julia. “Meta’s first store aims to lure consumers to the metaverse.” CNBC. May 09, 2022. Web.
O, Meemi. “Alibaba (Part 1): Introducing the Alibaba Ecosystem and Commerce Empire.” Investor Insights Asia. December 6, 2021. Web.
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Unlock Sample ResearchContributors
- 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