Involving the community can lead to very successful solutions and several companies are taking advantage of this trend.
Solutions from legacy IT vendors face increasing challenges from start-ups. These legacy solutions, while technologically advanced, fall behind when customers evaluate features/function. For example, Amazon built a very successful cloud solution with experience from a large community of start-ups and beat IBM to win the CIA’s multi-year cloud deal.
Several legacy IT vendors are seeing revenue drop as a result of increased losses to start-ups under current market conditions. While analyzing an uptick of such wins, I noticed a trend that the commonalities between winning solutions included strong community support. In this context, community is a collection of start-ups, partners and/or consumers. Below are some solutions enabled by strong community support that I believe are challenging legacy vendors’ solutions.