platforms

This post, part of a guest blog series on platform success strategies, originally appeared on Programmableweb.com.

This post, part of a guest blog series on platform success strategies, originally appeared on Programmableweb.com

Last week, Mashery Platform Strategy Director, Chuck Freedman, wrote about a few strategies to help your API platform achieve its business goals.  This is part two of that post, covering strategies 4-6 from Chuck’s Business of APIs talk, which he presented earlier this fall. 

4.  Establishing Effective Partner Engagement

Amazon and Facebook recently announced new developer tools.   Amazon now offers free A/B testing capability for Kindle Fire developers and Facebook’s changes made it so their developer documentation automatically generates from its source code.   

Companies that back their API offering with a strategic approach can experience a measurable success. We guide companies with existing and new APIs to understand their business goals and implement or create strategies that drive success.

Some of my favorite stories emerging from the app economy are those of apps that actually created platforms. In most cases, these platforms emerge from vision and strategy where the backend driving the app can and should be available to serve a larger ecosystem. The following stories are of companies that saw the potential of their functionality beyond their own successful apps.

Functionality infusion with Sincerely

One period of my career that I always try to keep in mind was my time with Salesforce.com. It was 2002—the economy was in lockdown mode and everyone was looking for innovation on a budget. I started selling Salesforce Automation (SFA) as a multi-tenant SaaS solution, and it turned out to be exactly the right offering for the right market at the right time.

In the past year, we’ve seen a surge in mobile devices and smartphones plunging into mainstream, giving millions of people the capability to browse the Internet, watch movies and stream music anywhere, without ever having to find a place to sit down and boot up a laptop or desktop. In fact, in a recent Gartner report, worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users reached a whopping 419 million units in the second quarter of 2012, where open OS smartphone devices made up over 36.7% of all mobile device sales.