Opening the ecosystem flood gates: Architecture challenges of opening interfaces within a product portfolio

Abstract

Technology firms are increasingly opening up their products to develop an active ecosystem of developing partners around it. Both opening up products and organizing a developer ecosystem around an organization are non-trivial. In this paper we provide a case study of a leading communications technology firm that opened up and platformized 11 product lines. First, we identify and describe four architecture patterns that are applied multiple times across these product lines. Also, the software ecosystems initiative is centralized in one central department, which has created a central knowledge hub for the creation of a software ecosystem. We highlight the guidelines collected by the central department, to assist technology firms in the platformization process and support them in their own software ecosystem creation efforts.