The value of open platforms: How an open software intelligence platform accelerates innovation

It's more important than ever for organizations to be flexible, adaptive, and customer-focused. Discover the benefits of an open, extensible software intelligence platform.

What is an open platform, and why do organizations need them?

Today, organizations face unprecedented challenges, including COVID-19 recovery, economic uncertainty, and technological disruption. An open platform can address some of the challenges organizations have experienced as they move to the cloud to become more resilient and agile in the face of disruption.

Organizations need to be flexible, adaptive, and customer-focused as they position for the future. Software should forward innovation and drive better business outcomes. But legacy, custom software can often prevent systems from working together, ultimately hindering growth. Conversely, an open platform can promote interoperability and innovation.

As organizations continue to operate in the cloud, open technologies become critical. Legacy technologies involve dependencies, customization, and governance that hamper innovation and create inertia. Therefore, organizational leaders must shift from old ways and embrace innovative platform services that not only help organizations become digital-native but also satisfy future needs.

Data supports this need for organizations to flex and modernize.

According to the “2022 Dynatrace CIO Report”, nearly 60% of chief information officers say the increasing complexity of their technology stack could soon overload their teams without a more automated approach to IT operations.

Without a platform built on open standards, however, organizations can get stuck managing legacy approaches that can’t flex and adapt. Instead, organizations should place primacy on using open technologies rather than legacy, custom-built ones. An open approach enables technologies to interoperate, whereas proprietary, legacy systems often create vendor lock-in and prevent interoperability and data integration. In what follows, we explore the value of an open platform for organizational innovation.

The platform approach vs. the best-of-breed approach

The monolithic platform approaches of the early 2000s don’t serve organizations today. While these legacy platforms were previously relevant, today’s businesses won’t trade innovation for corporate standardization.

Fed up with the technical debt of traditional platform approaches, IT teams often embrace best-of-breed software-as-a-service solutions. Indeed, if you ask these teams, they will say innovation and user experience are the biggest drivers for organizations to move away from legacy platforms.

But as tools proliferate, the pendulum swings back. Dozens of tools — each with its own narrow set of capabilities that are powerful but disconnected from the rest — have inundated enterprises and prevented teams from making fast progress.

When an IT organization houses many siloed tools, inconsistency increases. Most likely, tool integration is minimal, resulting in poor customer and employee experiences. Teams make flawed decisions because they work with siloed data that provides an incomplete picture. Additionally, the costs and risks of managing tools from multiple vendors skyrocket. Imagine security, risks, and procurement teams having to work with dozens of vendors, each with its narrow set of capabilities and no integration.

The best of both worlds: An open and extensible observability platform

Enterprises should adopt an approach that preserves the benefits of a platform while also enabling the delivery of best-of-breed solutions. It’s possible to achieve this feat if you consider what an open and extensible platform delivers. An open and extensible platform enables enterprise agility to promote innovation and seamless customer experiences with fewer resources.

Organizations should consider which platforms to bet on for their next phase of growth. A growth strategy involves identifying core focus areas in which an organization excels and where it outperforms others. While competitive advantage will emanate from the software teams build, at the same time, the complexity of building, operating, and maintaining modern software in the cloud can be overwhelming.

Organizations never have a team that’s big enough to manually handle all the complexity that working in modern cloud environments involves. That’s why development, operations, IT, and business teams need a software intelligence platform that eliminates complexity with the power of AI and automation.

Should you build or buy a software intelligence platform?

The debate surrounding whether to buy or build a platform has raged for some time, but basic wisdom still applies: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t put resources into building a platform that is available off the shelf. This goes with the notion that businesses should invest in building true differentiators. Otherwise, a software intelligence platform can make sense. The major benefit of buying the software intelligence platform is it eliminates data silos in addition to managing myriad fundamental capabilities, including the following:

• the integration of data from the full technology stack and the entire IT ecosystem;
• the storage and management of data for high-performance and cost-efficient analytics at scale;
• the real-time modeling and dynamic mapping of relationships for full data context; and
• AI-powered precise answers and timely insights with ad-hoc analytics.

Automation at scale

Engineering teams often gravitate toward a 100% do-it-yourself approach, which is OK for experimentation and testing. But DIY is neither sufficient nor scalable to meet enterprise needs in the long run. It’s a far better return on investment for teams to spend time on more strategic initiatives, such as delivering new business models that accelerate revenue, enable companies to enter new markets, and optimize business operations.

One way to do so is through an open and extensible software intelligence platform.

Let’s consider some of the ways a software intelligence platform like Dynatrace embraces this openness.

The value of an open software intelligence platform

New frameworks continue to emerge, and it’s important for a platform to incorporate these frameworks for users’ benefit.

Just because you build a platform doesn’t mean users will embrace it, however. Successful platform adoption requires a platform to be easy to use and integrate with other architectures, applications, and data sources. Without open standards, platforms promote lock-in and hinder innovation. With open standards, developers can take a Lego-like approach to application development, which makes delivery more efficient.

Empower your ecosystem with extensibility

Platform extensibility means a user can extend a software platform without having to modify the original codebase. So, users add to the base functionality, thereby offering new capabilities and outputs.

In turn, extensibility promotes platform flexibility. When a platform is open and extensible, it can be easily modified for a variety of business purposes. For organizations that want to scale and build new services, it’s critical to be able to extend the platform without customization or retooling. And, as organizations ingest greater volumes of data, this modular, extensible approach becomes critical.

OpenTelemetry

The OpenTelemetry framework is used for observability into cloud-native software. Teams can use it to instrument frameworks and components and export telemetry data, such as metrics, traces, and logs. Additionally, teams can use OpenTelemetry within Dynatrace to integrate with technologies that OneAgent technology doesn’t support or enrich existing telemetry data with additional spans and metrics.

How the open Dynatrace platform helps organizations innovate

Dynatrace offers a unified software intelligence platform that supports your mission to accelerate cloud transformation, eliminate inefficient silos, and streamline processes. Dynatrace offers best-in-class observability through an open, AI-powered data platform.

From application and infrastructure monitoring to digital experience and application security, we use purpose-built data and AI technologies across the full stack to simplify cloud operations, automate DevSecOps, and help organizations do more with less in the cloud.

Learn more about the Dynatrace platform and its Cloud Done Right architecture.