Ecosystem Technologies, an opportunity for both fuel retailers and suppliers

What is Ecosystem Technologies?

Ecosystem Technologies encapsulates an expanded set of IT capabilities and functions.

The new layer of Ecosystem Technologies represents a new set of capabilities as well as the extension of existing ones.

As an example: a fuel retailer could have a Bilateral (cloud based) maintenance system that connect to weather forecast service (Ecosystem IT) to enable forecasting of maintenance in case of heavy rain using direct EcoSystem connection to the relevant 3rd party service company.

IT has traditionally functioned as the foundation to keep fuel retailers running.

One of its core functions has been to protect company operations with firewalls and encryption to keep external technologies out.

With the advance of technologies, however, a vast array of capabilities and sources of competitive advantage are emerging beyond a business’ traditional walls. Those capabilities are bundled into in a wealth of new ecosystems.

IoT really come to play when systems and platforms start to share data and retailers starts to open up to an Ecosystem Mindset.

As an example Faschang Service and Management (www.omis.at) has created a bilateral cloud based system for service and management of fuel sites openly connect to other system such as tank sensors, shop freezers, car wash doors, service supplier’s dispatch systems etc. that orchestra a solution that allow to share data in fuel site with 100-300 pieces of equipment.

This “sudden” at hand overview has allowed large fuel retailers new capabilities and predictive maintenance and business intelligence.

How to take advantage of the Ecosystem

Whether you are a retailer or a supplier the very first step is to open your internal IT to the outside world. As easy as it may sound this is in many cases a big shift in corporate mentality.

This approach will allow architecting IT to link internally driven systems and capabilities into external systems.

Many companies have already been providing integration capabilities to upstream and downstream partners—technologies such as EDI (electronic data interchange) have been in existence for decades. However, those integration points are often static. They are bilateral connections with a small, pre-selected group of partners such as distributors and suppliers. Those points of integration happen infrequently and often in a batch.

The future of integration into external ecosystems will force companies to interact with many more partners covering a broad range of functions, ranging from customer sourcing to social advertising to payment solutions.

That’s because the low cost of technology and a dynamic start-up environment has led to a massive increase in the rate at which new services are being introduced. This means that the IT function must follow the ‘Amazon principle’ of making system components available as a service to enable integration with the ecosystem. The interfaces must be open, dynamic, and functional in real time so that they can integrate partners, technologies, and applications on an as-needed basis.

One clear implication is the need to design lightweight technology architecture built on microservices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow third parties to easily hook into the new ecosystem.

Autor: Morten Raaby

Feel free to contact the author at www.raaby2020.com for more information!