Welcome to the era of large numbers in #partnerships.

90% of companies are now using/planning to use partner API 🎉 [read - almost everyone]

If you multiply 90% to the results of IDC research below, it’s a lot of collaborations.

😮 IDC expects 500 million apps to be created and deployed in the cloud by 2023 [end of next year]

It’s worthwhile mentioning that the vast majority of 500M apps will be not standalone products, but rather apps created in non-code tools.

But still, there will be a lot of connected SaaS products. This is is the key reason why partnerships are both accelerating and evolving.

💡 This also makes #ecosystems more important. Here is why:

From our episode with Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem in HubSpot, where we discussed IDC report, explosion of apps and the role of ecosystems.

💬 Yes, there's the upside that we now have all this innovation and all this ability to create.

But the other side of that is how do we govern this? How do we make sure that in all this explosion of apps, the things are adhering to the right compliance? That we're able to make sure that we're unifying data and not fragmenting it. These are real challenges.

This goes back to when I was talking about that model of how we think about integrations and we talked about data, workflow, UI, but we also talked about governance.

Because I think it's an underappreciated value that an #ecosystem can provide.

It is really helping to take that responsibility to make sure that if you are building things or buying things in a particular platform ecosystem, that the platform ecosystem has done the work to make sure that these things meet a certain set of standards, they operate in a certain common way, the data is being aggregated in a consistent fashion.

That is super important."

👇 Check our full fireside chat with Scott Brinker

[Source: screenshot from the twit of Mark O'Neill, Chief of Research at Gartner]