Many of today's most popular (SaaS) business systems today, whether on-premise or in the cloud, can usually be configured but almost never completely customized. There is a good reason for this, mainly standardizing processes and best practices.
But what if your organization has a unique need that may never be addressed by your SaaS business system? Something very niche but critical to your company. You need to enable line of business as well as IT to address these unique needs and they need to be able to address them in a secure, fast and reliable way.
This is where platforms come in. Whether it be for mobility or desktop, you need to be able to extend your existing business systems in a way that is tailor fit for your organization's unique needs.
Without the ability to rapidly build, integrate, secure, deploy, manage and analyze purpose built apps that are extensions of your existing SaaS systems organizations will quickly become out innovated by the competition.
Investments in platforms are investments in innovation. They reduce the time, cost and complexity of delivering game changing solutions to Enterprise Organizations customers, employees, vendors and partners.
I don't think it is even a question whether Enterprise Organizations should be investing in innovation as a top priority.
SO WHAT DOES A GOOD PLATFORM LOOK LIKE?
Unified. Avoid many separate silos of tool sets. A unified approach means having all the tools you need in a single platform such as APIs, User Management, Role Management, Security Controls, Authentications, App Management, SDKs, Analytics, Logs, Testing Center, Cache Controls, Database (If needed outside of your SaaS product), Notifications & Workflows Engine, Deployment Mechanisms, SSO Support and Prototyping Tools to name a few.
All of these unified tool sets making up the platform need to be fast and easy to use. Any line of business should be able to make the proper configurations on the platform without having to write a single line of code.
Take the Halosys Unified Enterprise Mobility Platform for example. As Sonata Software's flagship mobility platform, the Halosys Platform delivers a complete toolset and acts as a enabler to extend your existing SaaS Systems or other Platforms (IoT for example) to rich and engaging mobile & web experiences.