The orchestrator's partner management framework for software ecosystems
Paul van Vulpen, Slinger Jansen, Sjaak Brinkkemper
Abstract
In software ecosystems, partner management concerns establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships with partners to improve ecosystem health. At the same time, software ecosystem orchestrators have insufficient insight into partner management tools. Because of this, they fail in attracting and maintaining partnerships with software producing organizations, ultimately hindering their ability to build healthy software ecosystems. This research presents a classification for partner management activities to aid orchestrators in establishing and maintaining partnerships. We contribute (1) a methodology to assess partner management in software ecosystems, (2) a classification of knowledge and activities for partner management, and (3) a starting point for the development of theory regarding partner management activities. The classification and the activities are evaluated in five case studies of software platform orchestrators.