A platform enables growth through connection. It’s more than a suite of tools from one company that come in a single package—it’s the foundation that connects your external systems, teams and data. It’s a digital ecosystem that creates new opportunities for trade and value creation across business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and consumer-to-business (C2B) interactions.
In the tech world, a platform is a technical framework that allows multiple software applications to be built within it and run in parallel. The term is often used to describe a combination of hardware and software that provides DevOps, IT, SecOps and NetOps engineering teams with what they need to build, connect and operate complex services for the business.
Another important use of the term is for a business model. Author Sangeet Paul Choudary defines a platform as “a different way of doing business, a networked flow that focuses on the front end of the transaction rather than the back end.” In this case, the platforms are marketplaces like Airbnb, Uber and Yelp where users exchange or sell goods and services such as short-term housing, rides and text posts. The platforms capture value by facilitating these exchanges, validating user identities and algorithmically optimizing buyer-seller pairings and the like. platform