General information about an open platform

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Open Platform Overview

An open platform is an approach where a company lets other companies build applications or offer products or services that can be used on their existing platform. The sponsoring company creates a standardized interface and allows other companies to build products and services leveraging their assets rather than controlling the development pathway.



Open Platforms has become popular in the energy and technology sectors and successful in the internet world through the use of open APIs (Application Programming Interface). 


How an Open Platform Works


An Open Platform leverages standards to let the third parties add functionality mainly in the energy and technology sectors. However, now applications are expanding into other industries because digital technologies have increasingly penetrated into daily home and work life. 


Benefits when using an Open Platform


There are numerous benefits to the open platform owner when letting partners to build applications or offer products or services that can be used on their existing platform: 
  • Offer features to customers while your organization is kept focused 
  • Allow for deep customization without tying up your own resources 
  • More closely integrate a customer to your system, making them less likely to leave 
  • Save time and money spent on sub-scale business development 


Where Open Platforms work well


Open Platforms will work well if they are platforms to serve a wide range of customer needs/ segments and a modular architecture lets different companies work together to support specific customer needs. 

Here are some elements referring to potential for open platforms to be successful:
  • Multiple capabilities required where one organization is unlikely to span everything 
  • Multiple customer needs and segments where a large variety of supported products will expand the market for the platform and fend off competing platforms 
  • Competition along the value chain making innovation in each module/ component a requirement to maintain the pace 
  • Financial models supporting the ecosystem of players where monetization maps to investment required 
  • Low frictional costs for stakeholders in the ecosystem to make the required connections to the platform, enter the market, sell their product (automated business development and digital data transfer is what makes this so compelling in internet-based models) 
  • Mechanisms for updating the standards as needs evolve