69. Modeling Partner Networks for Systematic Architecture Derivation in Software Ecosystems

Partner networks have proven successful in delivering comprehensive customer offerings. Market leaders of various domains, from industry to online services, leverage the innovative strength and resource capacities of their partners to complement and extend existing offerings or to define completely new offerings. Examples such as Amazon’s sales platform or Google’s Android network are just prominent representatives of a rich universe of digital cooperation strategies. Software ecosystems have emerged as a digital cooperation strategy in partner networks. They leverage a common technological base to coordinate the contributions of multiple software and service providers to a shared market. The technological base may consist of an execution platform such as Android, an open solution framework such as Eclipse, or just a set of standards such as DICOM or PROFINET. For a software ecosystem to flourish, the interests of all members have to be considered and balanced and the common technological base needs appropriate architectural design and engineering practices. Based on an industry-grade system as a running example, we describe an integrated approach that uses ecosystem modeling for both aligning the interests of ecosystem members and for architectural design.