Cloud Stocks and PaaS: Reporting Developer Ecosystem Metrics

Recently, I wrote Cloud Stocks and PaaS: Which SaaS Players Will Win in
PaaS, articulating a vision for a large number of SaaS players evolving into PaaS ecosystems.

We’ve been talking to and covering many of the PaaS players and their efforts in this direction.

One issue I would like to highlight in this analysis is how developer ecosystem metrics are currently being reported.

For any equity analyst to factor a PaaS strategy into their commentary, metrics are essential.

Here, for instance, are the metrics that would help me analyze the long term potential of Cloud companies that are pursuing PaaS:

1. What is the size of the developer ecosystem?
2. If a developer platform, then how many ISVs are building products on the
   platform? How many products?
3. If an API ecosystem, then how many ISVs are integrating products? How
   many integrations?
4. How much revenue is the developer ecosystem generating?
5. How much platform fee are the ISVs paying?
6. How much marketplace payments are being paid to developers?
7. How many startup ISVs have reached $1M in annual revenue?
8. How many startup ISVs have received seed funding?
9. How many startup ISVs have received Series A funding and beyond?
10. Any other metrics that illustrate the momentum of the developer
    ecosystem and its financial impact.
    

Note, I am making a distinction between enterprise developers and ISVs.

For example, Snowflake had 45,000 developers, but only a subset of these are ISVs.

Digital Ocean has 5 million developers, but they’re not all ISVs.

The reason this distinction is key is that while a developer inside a large enterprise or a system integrator may be a valuable user, (s)he will not contribute to the force multiplier effect that we believe PaaS will drive.

As always, please feel free to reach out if you’re doing a PaaS strategy and would like to discuss a co-branded global virtual accelerator with 1Mby1M on our Incubator-in-a-Box platform.

Photo by Carles Rabada on Unsplash

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This segment is a part in the series : Cloud Stocks and PaaS



. Which SaaS Players Will Win in PaaS
. Platform vs. API Ecosystems
. Reporting Developer Ecosystem Metrics
. How to Train a Developer Ecosystem
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