For decades, IT service companies have aided businesses across industry domains to reap maximum value from their technology investments. From simple consulting to large-scale development or implementation of enterprise applications and continuous customer support, there is a plethora of opportunities where businesses have leveraged the expertise of IT service companies. Research indicates that businesses outsource nearly 37% of all IT operations globally to IT partners. However, the technology landscape today has evolved considerably in recent times. Among the key changes is that businesses perceive technology as far more strategic and one of the foundational building blocks driving organizational growth, rather than being a mere cog in the wheel. And that may be putting pressure on established relationships as the expectations of enterprises evolve.

While traditional application development, maintenance, upgrades, and quality services continue to be the backdrop of the IT roadmap of any business, modern digital experiences are centered around amalgamating elements such as scalable architecture, deep product or platform engineering skills, scaled agile development methodologies, cloud ops, performance, chaos, and security engineering expertise successfully.

This is where conventional IT service companies may find it hard to deliver the expected business value.

Why traditional IT service providers are not well-equipped to manage modern product or platform engineering projects?

Historically, IT service companies have nurtured a business model that centered around building software to specs. These specs were usually outlined by technical teams within the businesses or by consultants handling program management on behalf of the business. They worked on routine application lifecycle engagements that plugged their skilled resources into various stages, delivering work packages in a largely risk-averse environment, delivering ROI but not necessarily outcomes.

However, the transition to platform or product engineering by businesses for creating their futuristic digital assets may require altogether new capabilities, processes, a different mindset, and commercial model.

Innovation is vital for the progressive growth of any business today. Technology partners must not only support their clients’ digital ambitions but also prioritize innovation while ensuring stability and reliability. From a strategic perspective, the future of modern digital businesses will revolve primarily around how effectively they can integrate and leverage capabilities in AI, data, cloud, security, product engineering, and customer experience while driving key business outcomes like accelerated time to market, cost optimization, and operational efficiency to sustain a distinct competitive advantage in their respective markets.

Additionally, to stay ahead in the AI race, businesses must build their platforms from the ground up, incorporating principles such as AI-first, intelligent systems engineering, composability, built-in quality, agility, and scalability. Evolving regulatory and compliance scrutiny on tech innovations that deal with customer data also requires tighter oversight and robust security measures to ensure data protection and privacy. These are capabilities not usually found or delivered by traditional IT service companies. Rigid processes, limited expertise in modern technologies, higher costs due to human-centric methodologies, longer development cycles, and low ability to customize services for unique platform requirements are some of the major roadblocks.

Let's now delve into how platform development follows a distinct lifecycle and identify the necessary technological support required.

Unique consultative roadmap

In the case of engineering platforms for growth, the key requirement is often to start from scratch. The core business model becomes the baseline for developing a digital platform to execute its unique workflows. Standard canned solutions do not work very well in such cases, and hence businesses need expert guidance on technology stacks, design elements, integration scenarios, infrastructure choices, deployment options, and much more. Venturing into unproven territory is not the forte of traditional IT service companies, and hence enterprises with a platform-led business philosophy would likely need a more capable partner.

Architecting growth priorities

Platform engineering requires a thorough understanding of the business landscape, including where and how the platform will be utilized. Designers must ensure that they can adapt and scale in response to changing user demands and technological advancements. Traditional IT service companies rely on architectural guidance focused solely on the technicalities and reliability of the software being built or implemented. They are usually laser-focused on the performance metrics of the software itself. To that extent, they concentrate upon how the software works but rarely on what it will do or how it will drive business outcomes.

However, this doesn’t work for today’s platforms. It is extremely important to imbue business growth concepts into the foundation when laying out development ideologies and roadmaps.

Managing diverse skills

Platforms or products built for enterprises may follow complex and sophisticated development philosophies and foundations linked to business growth. Appreciating these nuances requires people with a wide range of skills and expertise to handle critical workloads. For example, building a platform would need DevOps skills, cloud architecture knowledge, data engineering know-how, a GenAI-capable workforce, and so on. The various roles and skills needed will expand in time as businesses scale to meet their growth aspirations. This also needs healthy collaboration between different stakeholders to ensure that the end customers and users get the most value. This is a different approach when compared to that favored by IT service companies, which often trade in a limited set of skill deployments on projects with a fixed technical scope.

A major bottleneck that platform-oriented businesses are likely to face is labor shortages. Highly skilled labor is increasingly becoming hard to source, and adding further workload on existing staff who have business-critical duties may not be the best solution.

Use of tools and choice of environments

Traditional IT companies depend heavily on solution providers or infrastructure providers for guidance on the use of a specific tool or environment for a project. Platform-led organizations' unique business requirements may not align with the solutions built for generic customer scenarios. In platform engineering, solutions are often custom-built as features of the core platform, focusing on reducing developer load, improving productivity, transcending silos, and driving collaboration and synergies across the board.

Building platforms that can enable sustainable business growth

When it comes to platform engineering, the benefits can only be achieved if the business can get the right guidance to tackle complex challenges and help convert great ideas into real-life growth engines. This is where a trusted partner for product engineering like Xoriant can make a big difference. Over the years, we have worked with over 200 businesses and engineered over 950 different platforms that today successfully handle major global business services for our customers. Our expertise in digital engineering has enabled customers to significantly reduce the costs of developing platforms while at the same time setting them up in a growth trajectory designed to help increase revenue and profitability and guarantee the fastest ROI for tech investments.

To know how, get in touch with us.