I built the Nine Dimensions comparative diagnostic to evaluate the differences between organisations on their Ecosystem journey to gain both insights and potential gaps that might want to be filled, hopefully with my help.
Recently I undertook a set of focused evaluations on different Healthcare organizations- Novartis, Roche, Bayer, Royal Philips and Siemens Healthineers for understanding their present Ecosystem position.
My next step was to extend this diagnostic approach across into other sectors as well, in wanting to establish a more updated “universal” diagnostic tool. This post takes me into the Industrial sector and the e-commerce one
So,stepping out of the work achieved in the Heathcare sector I have actually re-tested* against a group of Industrial and e-commerce offering marketplaces connecting businesses and buyers worldwide. I chose Siemens AG, Schneider Electric, Salesforce and Alibaba.
*Why re-tested? In much earlier work on Ecosystem validations I used a different nine dimensions, more general-purpose instrument: it was good for establishing “does this company have ecosystem architecture at all,” weak for discriminating between companies that are all somewhere in the ecosystem-emerging middle or their own ecosystem understanding. It helped me learn and relate as I was building my IIBE blueprint
This revised Nine Dimension is a sharper, more comparative instrument because it was built (or refined) under the pressure of actually needing to differentiate real companies against each other, not designed in the abstract.
This was a test to run pulling current evidence on each company’s actual ecosystem/partner model. In this specific diagnostic I had expected a cleaner split between Siemens and Schneider and Salesforce and Alibaba as these two are regarded as more mature in their Ecosystem approaches
Running this Diagnostic delivered some surprises
The evidence did not split as cleanly into these two groups as a previous post of mine had argued showed differences “The core problem: platforms taught the wrong logic” I think that’s a more useful finding than if it had confirmed the thesis outright. This further explains differences and pushed the Nine Dimension diagnostic into a deeper territory, providing greater clarity and differences
What the research actually shows, before any dimension scoring:
Siemens Xcelerator and Schneider EcoStruxure are exactly what the post describes — curated marketplaces, certified/tiered partners (Build & Sell / Consult & Service / Enable & Run for Siemens; Master/Certified tiers for Schneider), formal “technical and commercial governance” gating what enters the platform.
But Salesforce and Alibaba are not ungoverned or gatekeeping-free — they’re heavily governed too, just governed differently. Salesforce’s AppExchange runs on certification, credentialing (132,000 “credentialed experts”), and tiered partner levels (Ridge through Summit), and its own materials explicitly call ecosystem governance “vital” as AI scales.
Alibaba is, if anything, more centrally controlled than Siemens — it runs a dedicated Platform Governance Department, active IP enforcement “crackdowns,” and its own SEC filing describes the ecosystem as organized around “our technology platform, our marketplace rules, and the role we play in connecting these participants.” That’s textbook central-rules language, not distributed orchestration.
So the real difference is something narrower: Scale of network effects and openness to interoperability standards. Salesforce is moving early on MCP/A2A agent interoperability specifically; Alibaba’s moat is data-driven network density (930M Taobao users, self-reinforcing merchant/buyer flywheel) rather than governance style. Siemens and Schneider’s governance apparatus looks similar in form to Salesforce’s — the gap is in maturity and network density, not in whether control exists.
That’s actually a useful stress test of the instrument itself. Here’s how the Comparative Nine Dimensions reads across all four, with confidence flagged per cell:
| Dimension | Siemens (Xcelerator) | Schneider (EcoStruxure) | Salesforce (AppExchange) | Alibaba |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Strategic Intent & Ecosystem Purpose | Evidenced — explicit platform strategy, stated intent to shift portfolio to modular/API-based | Evidenced — EcoStruxure positioned as core growth strategy | Evidenced — explicit “Agentic Enterprise” ecosystem strategy | Evidenced — ecosystem is the core operating model, not a bolt-on |
| 2. Value Architecture & Proposition Design | Moderate — value still largely Siemens-hardware-centric, partners extend rather than co-create | Moderate — similar, EcoStruxure remains SE-anchored | Strong — value increasingly partner-generated (7,000+ ISV apps) | Strong — value is structurally merchant/buyer-generated, Alibaba mediates |
| 3. Partner & Actor Orchestration | Moderate — structured tiers, still largely one-directional (vendor→partner) | Moderate — explicit “channel conflict” governance language, i.e. orchestration exists but is conflict-managed, not co-created | Strong — partner program described as extending “the business,” not just the channel | Strong — merchants actively shape category/pricing dynamics, not just distribution |
| 4. Data Intelligence & Knowledge Flows | Weak-Moderate — no evidence of cross-partner data sharing infrastructure found; data stays enterprise-bound | Weak-Moderate — same pattern as Siemens AG | Strong — MCP/A2A native agent interoperability is explicitly a cross-system data/intelligence flow architecture | Strong — data-driven network is explicitly named as the mechanism, in its own filing |
| 5. Governance & Trust Architecture | Strong formal governance (ISO 27001, IEC 62443 certification) — but this is control-governance, not trust-distribution | Strong formal governance, explicit channel-conflict management | Strong — but framed as enabling (“trust controls” for openness), not restricting | Strong, and explicitly enforcement-oriented (Platform Governance Dept, IP crackdowns) — doesn’t fit the “abandoned gatekeeping” narrative |
| 6. Innovation Architecture & Emergence Capability | Moderate — innovation still Siemens-curated (portfolio “curated,” not emergent) | Moderate — similar curation pattern | Strong — ISV-driven feature emergence at genuine scale | Strong — merchant-driven category emergence (Trade Assurance evolved from partner/market pressure) |
| 7. Resilience & Adaptive Capacity | Insufficient evidence found either way from this pass | Insufficient evidence | Moderate — evidenced by AI-driven adaptation of the partner program itself | Moderate — evidenced by “China Plus One” supply diversification response |
| 8. Moat Architecture & Competitive Positioning | Moderate — moat is Siemens’ installed base + certification barrier, not network effect | Moderate — same pattern | Strong — explicitly named by Salesforce’s own leadership as “a moat that keeps competition at bay” | Strong — self-reinforcing network effects named explicitly in the 20-F |
| 9. Dynamic Orchestration & Evolution Capacity | Weak — no evidence the company itself changes shape based on partner activity, partners adapt to Siemens | Weak — same | Moderate-Strong — partner program restructured around outcomes/AI shift, evidence of two-way evolution | Moderate-Strong — 2023 holding-company restructuring was partly a response to ecosystem complexity |
So: the Comparative instrument holds up outside healthcare — it’s discriminating real differences here, not manufacturing them. But it discriminates on a narrower, more specific claim than the blog post I offered currently makes.
Siemens and Schneider concentrate value by design (partners extend the vendor’s platform, don’t co-own it) and seem to be mirroring each other. So within this specific analysis neath has a unique edge to pull ahead. The recent acquisition by Schneider of Cognite might shift the ballance
.Alibaba runs enforcement crackdowns and centrally-set marketplace rules — concentration, not circulation. And Salesforce’s own leadership described the partner ecosystem, in their own words, as “a moat that keeps competition at bay” — that’s an admission that the governance exists to protect Salesforce’s position, not to circulate value outward. Both Alibaba abs Salesforce have dominating positions to determine “their” rules.
So my closing point in that recent post lands exactly: irrespective of the “open ecosystem” language all four use, the underlying intent is extraction — intelligence, knowledge, and commercial advantage flowing toward the center, not genuinely circulating. They’re all somewhere on the same rule-based/extractive spectrum, just at different points of network scale and openness-of-form
Based on what actually came out of the Siemens/Schneider/Salesforce/Alibaba test — just reading back what the evidence did and didn’t support that would need further investigation by exploring the Nine Dimensional diagnostic further, at some point.
Recognising the Nine Dimensions and what this gave here as “evidence”
Within the Nine Dimensions you gain a good sense of what is working and doing a good analytical job and what may not be revealing what it is intended to do. Let me share the assessment of this
Strong — discriminated cleanly and had public evidence to check against:
- D4, Data Intelligence and Knowledge Flows — split the two groups sharply (Siemens/Schneider stayed enterprise-bound; Salesforce/Alibaba showed real cross-actor data/intelligence infrastructure). Also easy to evidence — companies either show this or they don’t.
- D8, Moat Architecture and Competitive Positioning — same story, and unusually well self-evidenced: Salesforce’s own leadership described their ecosystem as “a moat,” Alibaba’s own filing named network effects explicitly. Companies volunteer this one in their own language.
- D9, Dynamic Orchestration and Evolution Capacity — cleanly separated “partners adapt to us” (Siemens/Schneider) from “we restructure in response to the ecosystem” (Salesforce’s AI-driven partner program overhaul, Alibaba’s 2023 holding-company split). This is the dimension that most directly tests whether a company treats its ecosystem as a source of pressure it responds to, or just a channel it manages.
Moderate — functional, but either low-discrimination or middling evidence:
- D1, Strategic Intent — necessary but not very differentiating. Every company that talks about ecosystems at all scores “evidenced, coherent” here almost by definition — it’s a gate, not a comparator.
- D2, Value Architecture, D3, Partner and Actor Orchestration, D6, Innovation Architecture — all moved in the expected direction between the two groups but less sharply than D4/D8/D9, and with more room for interpretation in how “moderate” vs “strong” gets called.
Weaker — need work before I’d use them in a real evaluation for prodicing clear results:
- D5, Governance and Trust Architecture — this is the one we just fixed conceptually but haven’t re-tested. Scored against “does formal governance exist,” it didn’t discriminate at all — all four looked similar. Currently this dimension is doing the least work of the nine to determine the S & W. This spots whjats in place but not its aspects to be improved
- D7, Resilience and Adaptive Capacity — not conceptually wrong, but it’s the dimension most likely to get filled with plausible-sounding inference rather than real evidence in a external evaluation, precisely because public sources rarely address it directly. It needs internal inputs
One outcome of this is the decision to drop and add a different dimension
This is not because the prsent component is not right to explore but it requires a more open- client facing exploration for the internal assessment
So I will be replacing D7 Resiliance And Adaptive Capacity as it is weak on public evidence with Optionality and Option Debt + Volatility conditions replacing it. It’s the O&V lens — the same one with the dual-score public-baseline/concern-threshold method already proven and written about specifically in posts on “Royal Philips: Two Scores, One Diagnostic, What the O&V Lens Surfaces” and Northvolt as the pioneering Business Case : “What happens when your Ecosystem shows signs of Collapsing” Optionality and Volatility I have treated as a seperate, stand alone lens, that will continue but within this nine dimensions we are looking at “early” strengths and weaknesses. The lens to explore this is well in plance.
Caveats are always needed in diagnostic and discovery work
One caveat on all of this: it’s a read from a single test, on four companies, in industrial/enterprise-software/e-commerce sectors. Worth treating as a first data point on the instrument’s strengths, not a settled verdict but these add further diagnostic weight to the Healthcare evaluation series based on the Nine Dimensions. It enables structured engagement and within those dialogues you reevaluate on these nine components what is seemn known with what can be achived prior to enagement.
The nine component diagnostic is an essential part of the IIBE diagnostic and discovery stage to bring a tighter focus to understanding individual ecosystems and providing focal points to explore resolve and leverage
This was work the retest undertook and shared here.
The Healthcare comparisions can be read in these links
- The Healthcare series evaluated in different posts Novartis, then looking at both Roche vs Bayer, Royal Philips comparing against competitive rivals and my initial benchmark of Siemens Healthineers.
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