Unfortunately, the term “platform” is used in a lot of different ways to mean a lot of different things. It’s unfortunate because it’s hard to really nail down what it means in any specific instance. At a very generic level, a “platform” is something designed to make it faster, easier, lower cost and lower risk to build and manage something. Some of the other ways that the word “platform” is used is to describe a particular family of hardware that comes with development tools and libraries and perhaps some type of provisioning system, and that might be referred to as a “platform” because it’s the building blocks and the scaffolding, if you will, that you would use to build a device.
You can also have “platforms” where their focus is more about device management, so they don’t really have anything to do with the devices themselves, they don’t really have anything to do with the application, but they have to do with how you provision and manage thousands or hundreds of thousands of devices. And as you work your way up the stack, the word “platform” has been used for what Prism is, which is a set of tools and an operating environment that is built around the idea of using it to build custom applications. And sometimes software like Prism is called an “application platform” or even an “application enablement platform.”
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