Aug 12, 2021
Nick Veenhof is the CTO of Dropsolid, a Digital Experience company, offering a single platform driven by various Open Source technologies.
In this episode:
What specialization has to do with the evolution of organizations and why is it essential to think about companies as part of complex (digital) ecosystems?
Tune in and learn about:
- What’s the difference between Digital Experience and Developer Experience platforms
- Why pure SaaS solutions can be a dead end for organizations on the long term
- Why APIs and digital ecosystems mean serious challenge for data sovereignty
- Why specialization is crucial for organizations to provide value, and how Dropsolid and Pronovix managed to find their markets by differentiation
Contents:
2:45 Digital Experience and Developer Experience: two sides of the same coin
4:00 build or buy
4:30 out-of-the-box, configure, build
5:35 devportal-as-a-service
7:00 Product businesses, where an API portal is a must VS Service businesses they should/could have API portals
8:00 time is our common constrain: reducing the time of building integrations means that you are faster than the competition
9:00 two main driving factors of change today: Digital proximity: digital experience through interfaces. A defined end-to-end journey that organizations can control Complex adaptive organizations: instead of hierarchical control they provide capabilities for users and even ecosystems
12:50 social impact of open source: it is about sharing and reusing
17:00 organization size: above a certain level human scale interconnections are no longer possible
17:50 shift from human centered hierarchical organzitaions to structures where teams communicate via interfaces
19:00 creating APIs: governance and constraints are crucial
19:40 on top of that: you need developer experience that helps adaptivity and evolvement
21:50 API gateways and data sovereignty
22:30 “Do I really have control over my data?”
24:50 “Are you a product or a service company? – Kind of both.”
27:00 Customers often expect clean product with clear boundaries. But then in the long term it is against scalability.
29:50 Who is going to adapt to whom? The organization will adapt to the tool or the way around? Young organizations might be able to do the former one.
31:50 60-70 people in a company is the scale where nobody can contact everybody in a timely manner
33:30 deploy auto-braking machines above a size: making things sustainable is key in large and medium orgs
35:50 transitioning from an (Drupal) agency to a DX company was crucial in the success of both Dropsolid and Pronovix
38:00 Challenge: help customers shaping the project rather than just providing what they (think they) need
41:00 Open Source and Fair Code license
45:00 differentiating, specializing and succeeding as a company is similar to the evolution of species
45:50 building ecosystems
47:00 ecosystems: Walmart vs. Amazon
