Platform Schizophrenia

This year I became aware that there are two definitions to Digital Platforms. Whilst I had been meandering around in IT Space thinking that digital platform meant services like AWS and Azure, our friends in Marketing Space had decided that digital market places were Digital Platforms. So to them ComparetheMarket.com, Deliveroo.com and Uber.com are platforms. 

Anyway moving on from this diversion, it has for some time been a surprise to me that amazon has dominated IT thoughtspace and the market for PaaS based Digital Platforms, whilst belatedly Microsoft pushed into the market with Azure. 

In recent projects I have been involved with both AWS and Azure as well as all sort of fun with the OSS tools which are available on them. To traditionalists coming across the database as a service offerings available is quite amazing. I was also blown away when a Solution Architect who had no experience of Neural Networks was able within 2 weeks to knock up a fully working and trained prototype of a Machine Learning application on Azure.

So it has become increasingly interesting to see that Google, one of the most born in the cloud companies going, has recently started promoting its services. One has to ask why did they wait so long, especially as they have always made much of the fact that their products are all architected around a SOA concept and the ability to expose themselves as services, both internally and externally.

Oracle and IBM have also appeared actively in the market place this year promoting their own special blends. 

The thing about this is that they all have really good stories to tell. You will note that I am not stating any preferences, as to be honest, anything I say about them today will already be wrong tomorrow as this is an ever faster moving situation. Today's facts will be obsolete tomorrow.

So what does it all mean to the average business trying to go Digital?

Firstly, the means are there. You have to be comfortable with the fact that terms and conditions are what they are. You need to examine the pricing and understand how this would play out in some key real world applications. However there is plenty available to "Free Your business from the Tyranny of Infrastructure" and Focus on Value. If you choose reasonable sensibly, you will be able to scale costs with business activity and exploit platforms which support Agile and DevOps so you can move quickly and lightly in the pursuit of opportunities. All the major vendors are investing significantly in security and if you dig deeper, most offer localisation options if data cannot move outside certain jurisdictions. Additionally there are industry certification schemes which many providers are signed up to. So a lot of inhibitors have been addressed.

The key issue is going to be how much do you insulate yourself from the risk that you may need to change platform provider. Business Performance, Legislation, Pricing etc. will change with time. So you may need an exit plan. Therefore, some thought needs to be given to insulating yourself from future supply threats. Where your application is going in for short term gains, e.g. a new financial instrument which will only be around for a a few months or perhaps a couple of years, this is not a problem. But if you are locking yourself into a platforms specific machine learning solution for years, you may need to think how you would deal with problems if the platform vendor ceases training.

In the end, however, we have always faced these problems. Finding a totally vendor agnostic solution has always been too complicated and too costly. So its time to get comfortable with not being in total control. The System of Systems concept of de-optimising components to integrate and optimise the overall performance of the Big System applies. You just need to understand your risk appetitie, your risks, how you want treat them, what you will accept, what you need to insure against and get on with it. The risks of not doing so are far greater.