Software Ecosystem Orchestration with Topic Modeling

Abstract

Software ecosystems are typically networks of organizations collaboratively serving a market for software around a technical platform. Software ecosystem orchestrators are responsible for the health of these networks, for instance by attracting new applications to application stores and by opening new parts of the platform for extension. Considering the amounts of application data that orchestrators have to deal with, we propose an approach for strategic analysis of the software ecosystem that uses topic modeling. With our approach, orchestrators are supported in their task of growing and pruning their platform software ecosystem. We illustrate the use of the approach in two case studies of rapidly expanding and competing software platform ecosystems.