Building software distribution is hard, costly and time-consuming. I have discussed the challenges in building and operating your control plane. To learn more, please see here and here

A typical startup journey looks like this: you have an idea, you validate the market, 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 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 an 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.

Let’s be honest, 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, 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. The sad part is that it may almost cost your business as other competitors are moving to more matured control plane platforms

Not only will they be years ahead but they 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 quarters/years by risking the entire business and forever carry the baggage of running, managing, operating, distributing this operating system in the market. It's not an exaggeration because control planes are operating system for the software distribution. Read this for more details: https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/151, https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/150, https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/149

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 your custom tooling/services using open standards to giving you full control to simply extend your control planes (generated by Omnistrate) with no restrictions. To learn more, please reach out to us at [email protected].

To learn more about:

• What is omnistrate, see this
• Why we built Omnistrate Platform, please see here
• For technical details, see here

To learn more about how users can leverage a developer platform like Omnistrate to address many of these challenges, please see here.