Building software distribution channel(s) is hard, costly and time-consuming. I have discussed the challenges in building and operating your Control Plane before. To learn more, please see older version here and newer version here
A typical startup journey looks like this:
- you have an idea,
- you validate the market,
- you design your app,
- you build your initial MVP,
- you raise some capital.
After raising the initial capital or in some cases just before, you are looking to monetize by finding a product-market fit. Now, you can spend the next few years to build an operating system for your software distribution (aka Control Plane) or or you can focus on your application to build core differentiation or competitive moat. Doing one of them is extremely hard, trying to do both will also add significant risk to the success of your business and long-term success.
Analogy: When we build an application, we typically don’t think about building the underlying core operating system or database as it makes no sense to spend time and energy and instead just use the existing components. In the same way, we have built Omnistrate (Developer platform) that allows you to build your software distribution without having to spend the majority of your engineering resources in building and operating the control plane layer.
Now, some may feel like you want to have more control on this layer by writing each line by hand. By that definition, the same is true with any other software layers (like operating systems, databases, caching, etc.) and yet you offload those layers due to one or more reasons: 1/ time to market 2/ cost-effective 3/ lack of expertise. The key question you should be asking is if this is a core area of differentiation for you to give up on these major advantages.
Some of you may feel that this is an area of differentiation especially if you haven’t built one, and you may feel that this will be cool and you are innovating. The truth is far from that and you can offer much more value by focusing on your application, much more quickly at a fraction of a price than forever taking on an additional overhead for your business to build and operate your control plane. This is especially true, given building control planes is nothing short of building your own operating systems: https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/151, https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/150, https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/149. Note that Control Planes will continue to get more complex with new requirements, use-cases, technology advancements, customer expectations.
Not only will your competitors be years ahead but they will have significantly more resources to focus on application and innovate faster. It’s like saying that I want to build my own operating system because we can do a better job than experts with decades of experience, catch up with everyone in the operating system space in addition to the innovating on the core software with extremely limited resources, delay monetizing our innovation by years by risking the entire business and forever carry the baggage of building, innovating, and operating this operating system (for software distribution) in the market.
The sad part is that it may almost cost your business as other competitors are moving to more matured Control Plane platforms. Why? - Omnistrate has already proven that it's possible to build general-purpose control planes and have proven them in production at-scale with a wide variety of use-cases. Like Code CoPilot is real, Control Planes (aka CoPilot for Platform teams) is real i.e. organizations who are going to spend several 100s of engineers and years to implement on this are doomed to fail (or compete). How will these organizations compete with their competitors leveraging systems like Omnistrate with <10 engineers? -- that's 100x slower to market and 10x more expensive!!
Moreover, custom-build Control Planes will be years behind compared to start-of-the-art systems like Omnistrate to build Control Planes. By leveraging Omnistrate, not only will you accelerate the current journey by 100x but also have the future proofing to stay ahead of the market by leveraging Omnistrate (state of the art Control Plane Developer Platform) to extend their current Control Plane.
Now, you may have some unique requirements. It may make sense to innovate those parts and leverage a developer platform like Omnistrate to build your control plane for the rest. However, just naively thinking that your entire control plane is unique would be a huge mistake. To support customization and flexibility, Omnistrate provides several mechanisms at each layer from being able to inject custom UDFs, integrate with open-source or SaaS developer tooling/services using open standards across domains (observability, alerting, billing, auth etc) to giving you full control. To learn more about Omnistrate, check this out: https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/152
If you would like to discuss further on how to augment your current stack to unlock new distribution channels or optimize your existing distribute channels, check this out: https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/151 or reach out to us at: support@omnistrate.com.
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