August 1, 2011 -- SOC ecosystems are changing. Quality and focus are replacing volumes of names as companies that fund them begin to narrow down which partners add the most value and which markets they need to target.
Establishing a ring of allies is nothing new, of course. IBM had its circle of most trusted software partners back in the 1970s when mainframes were the dominant computing platform, and Microsoft built its fortune on creating the longest list of applications developers in the PC industry, to the detriment of IBM's OS/2 and various flavors of Unix. But in SOC development this kind of approach has been much-less structured, in part because the relationship between companies was never as well-defined and in part because disaggregation is, at least by historical standards, a relatively new phenomenon.
By Ed Sperling, Consulting Editor
This brief introduction has been excerpted from the original copyrighted article.
