Products and Platforms

The knowledge industry in India is moving towards products and platforms as the services model is losing steam. For long, the IT industry in India has been providing services to the products, platforms, or core software developed by global majors. With automation, all this is becoming a shrinking pie.

The value zone has shifted now. With democratization and mass customization, multi-sided platforms are growing exponentially. The scale at which they can operate is bringing the per-user cost at price points that are shifting the market. The new economy is majorly about IP (integration platforms), platforms, and products.

At this point, we need to embrace the market dynamics, and the entire ecosystem has to upgrade itself. We must move from a pure service provider mindset to a sustainably mature product mind-set. The investors have to move away from quarterly returns to long term bets at the same time. The workforce has to move into an innovation momentum and continuous improvement, research, learning loops, and data sets.

The experience is taking centre stage as we move in that direction and so does the agility of the platform as well as the innovative design and fundamentals. Platforms need large teams to support and sustain, and any rejection from the users and the ecosystem plummets all the efforts and returns.

We are indeed at an exciting inflection point as we intrinsically change the core of our knowledge industry and embrace the external change of Industrial 4.0. Therefore, we need to be ready for a different ball game and a different level of performance altogether.

Author - Ajay Davessar