As software solutions mature, the businesses that invested in them continually look for new and interesting ways of leveraging said investment. In plain terms, they want to make more money from the software they have already paid for.
There are a number of well-established ways of doing this, but PaaS (Platform as a Service) or SaaS (Software as a Service) are the most popular and are very much in vogue in terms of new and interesting ways of making more money out of an existing software platform. You may recall that we briefly touched upon these in Chapter 3, Culture and Behaviors—The Cornerstones to Success, in relation to third-party tools. The premise is pretty simple; you expose via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) certain parts of functionality to a first or third party who that uses APIs to extend their software platform to include the...