Today we are present at the development of the digital economy based on the redesign and complex digitization of organizational and functional processes within companies, the foundation of which are digital ecosystems. The article describes the prerequisites for their emergence and examines the boundaries, structure and main elements of digital ecosystems, shows the interaction between the company's client and the platform, and describes the mechanism of data transformation into knowledge in the process of their complex processing and operation. An analysis of the world's largest digital ecosystems was been conducted and approaches for building and implementing digital ecosystems within small and medium-sized enterprises were presented.