The sheer volume of data that is collected has exploded in recent years thanks to digitalization and modern cloud architectures that support massive data collection, and encourage widespread cross-sharing of data.

The growth trend of having applications with easily accessible API’s, provide a rich base for rapidly adding functionality, and choice of functionality to new applications, based on existing software that is already being widely used. – Enabling a customer to expand their existing systems easily through choice of software is a real example of Open Innovation. This approach makes it easier to get your software adopted into a customer’s existing business capabilities.

e.g. Industry-specific software that is purpose-made for a specific task, can focus on that job alone. Using integration to 3rd party software like Jira and Slack to ensure communication channels and processes and task management are taken care of using existing solutions. Other examples might show accounting software being linked to, so you can process the work, and let other systems manage the money without becoming experts in multiple country-specific legislation.

This Open Innovation approach ensures that the supporting infrastructure around your products continues to improve and offer richer features and capabilities without you having to invest heavily in that part of the process. So while it may seem like your solutions don’t get so much of the pie, you are likely to get more pies to eat, for less cost which means better returns on investment. This approach also lowers time to market, and enables clear focus on the specific task at hand. i.e. Be a master of one job, rather than a jack of all trades!

An additional business model that is growing in popularity and helps with recurring revenue generation (which is best for company valuation) comes from the upsell of free versions (or lower-tiered versions) of your software to those that include specific/popular 3rd party integrations.

As software developers, we often look for a single code base solution to get to market faster, reduce our initial development costs, and ongoing running costs. As we build our solutions, however, we should also be looking at the time, knowledge and code debt that comes with building modules within our software.

This is really where RAD Server and the Enterprise Connectors from CData come in. Using RAD Server, you can build very powerful API’s that are easily integrated into other systems, while at the same time, making sure the key integrations you need for your software features are available through simplified access to 70+ enterprise software solutions. RAD Server also enables the rapid movement of business logic from traditional VCL based applications into new cloud-based versions, so it is ideal for getting more value from your existing codebase.