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Enterprise Software Is Dead

44 points by tablet 7y ago

wrnr 7y ago
It is? If so, the same market dynamics not are pushing people to pick service X by amazone/google/microsoft. Its a fools aren to compete with Atlassian on developer productivity software. Think you can find a better offering then their suite
msrpotus 7y ago
As long as companies use CRM and ERP systems, enterprise software is going to stick around. That’s just a fundamentally different proposition than one team starting to use Slack or Twilio.
zitterbewegung 7y ago
No, it is still alive. Processes for approving outside software still exist as is convincing stakeholders. Also, I don't think its a good idea to rely on startups for larger businesses because of the very fact they get acquired / acquihired or simply close down and you are left with no alternative. If it is a open source project with a company that offers a service and support contract then maybe but there are really large companies where Enterprise software still reigns.
harryf 7y ago
Unfortunately most SaaS companies today have got on a bandwagon of offering “enterprise” versions of their products which alienate those which brought them bottom up into a corporation in the first place. You can see it in the “pricing” page that goes exponential on the “enterprise” offer and requires calling a sales organization that takes days or weeks to respond (vs filling in a form and providing credit card details). Usually it looks something like this; - Free: $0 but limited - Private: $5 / month for some extra features but limited collaboration - Professional: $49 / month / user ... includes collaboration up to N users - Enterprise: insane pricing that needs board level approval and will cost your company $millions / year Free to Professional level I can kind of understand but in terms of scaling, the Enterprise is dumb. If you make me - a developer / designer / PM / etc have to kick off board level meetings to pay for this product, you already lost. SaaS companies need to keep their pricing scalable so that as their product goes “viral” in an enterprise, people with purchasing control up to $10000 / year in departments and groups across the corporation can keep paying by credit card without needing to get additional approval. Stop making work for your supporters
- raverbashing 7y ago
  Alienating? Possibly More alienating and expensive than some crap by SAP or IBM? Probably not. > a developer / designer / PM / etc have to kick off board level meetings to pay for this product, you already lost. Don't worry, you don't have to do it. Their sales team will do the job once you're at professional level.
  - jimnotgym 7y ago
    SAP write some really good and very complicated software to do compicated things. It is not 'crap'. Their ERP offering is really solid. The anecodtes about SAP going wrong are imho due to implementation issues. There is nothing I have seen from the SAAS space that is close to doing what the fullblown SAP ERP products can do for a multinational, multicurrency manufacturer
- devoply 7y ago
  Joel Spolsky says anything more than 1k is too much and require approval. Has this amount now changed?
  - harryf 7y ago
    That may be right. I’m in Switzerland where the first level of management usually gets a free pass on things up 5000K or 10000K
- jcims 7y ago
  Some enterprises justify the astronomical increase in spend because of the overhead required to consummate the commercial relationship.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    Not sure why you are being down voted. We started integrating with a company everyone knows. Our $80/mo package totally suited their initial needs. They said they couldn't budget for such a small line item and required that we increase the price.
shadowtree 7y ago
Reads great at face value, but is literally just content marketing. Author took some observations from the last decade (I guess Salesforce is big now, huh?) and added some VC Twitter blurbs about “consumerization”. Listening to VC Twitter is funny though, turns out they’re money lenders first and foremost, not in the business of actually writing and selling software. So it’s a game of telephone, with a 8-12 months delay, but high dose of posturing. The main distinction between SMB and Enterprise is not the software itself, hasn’t been in a looong time. It’s sales. And there, enterprise is alive and happy, getting even more centralized, globalized and thereby different. The main driver for this? Security and Compliance. CIOs will get fired if: They allow a Maersk-style ransomware disaster OR They don’t have their shit in order when the GDPR-style audit rolls in. Marketing automation got concentrated into 2 cloud players now (SFDC, Adobe) for that reason. The new enterprise. And SMB that operates internationally now buys whatever the big guys are having. Yes, enterprise is dead - for anyone trying to sell into it with SMB techniques. Slack has strong headwind because of it, their enterprise plan is a) insanely priced and even worse b) backed by a totally inept sales team when it comes to “enterprise”.
nathanaldensr 7y ago
This is a crap article--a rant. It presents no convincing evidence of the premise. If enterprise software is dead, why am I seeing its use all around me? My anecdotes hold just as much weight as the author's. Oh, and the author has something to sell, too.
- gchokov 7y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Living and breathing in Enterprise software world. The author is clueless.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  As my former startup now subsidiary is being forced to abandon working products for inferior ones in the name of "enterprise" or some box checking version of "security" I also agree that this notion of enterprise software going away is a bit silly. They tried to hook some new enterprise ready expenses tool in and force us to use it. It exposed the entire pay structure of the company to anyone who wanted to know. We were back in the old product that worked before the official launch of the new one. We have had numerous people leave because of literally arbitrary policies like buying a meal at an airport is covered but buying a water or snacks is not a covered expense. I.e. your always forced to the most expensive option and in the same breath being told to reduce travel expenses. There now my rant is anecdotal too.
wil421 7y ago
I agree with the part about SaaS taking hold in the enterprise. ServiceNow, Workday, O365 and being pushed by hard by KPMG/Accenture and all the other consulting vultures. I’ve been cleaning up the SaaS messes left by consultants for the last 5 years. Developers do have a voice now but in my experience it is quickly over looked by VPs and above, especially if consultants are around. Slack is a better product but the VPs and up are already paying for O365. To them Microsoft Teams is much more attractive (and a worse product). Microsoft knows this and has been pushing it hard. Don’t agree with this rant of an article.
buboard 7y ago
What has changed is that it is now possible to make chat and video apps in the browser and ppl take advantage of it. There's also a lot of money thrown in startups, and an SaaS for every tiny bit of workflow. Let's see if this "wave" is sustainable without a VC bubble.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  Short answer no. No business is sustainable without startup money from somewhere. The problem is the wealthy have so much money and there's not enough money at the ground level to buy the new products so without dumping money into crazy new ideas they can't ever grow their money at the top. It's a self limiting factor of capitalism, for the system to function properly money must be evenly distributed amongst those with needs to be fulfilled.
jimnotgym 7y ago
I would like to challenge this article on several points > a stark distinction existed between enterprise software (targeting Fortune 2000 companies) and the rest of business software (targeting mid-market and SMB). Not true. SMBs often use ERP systems which have all of the features mentioned next > Enterprise software was generally bought by CTOs, CIOs, and CEOs. They’d make a choice largely based on what the analyst firms told them, and were incentivized to make the safest possible choice, not the best choice. It didn’t matter much if their employees liked or hated the software, because they had no other choice. It didn’t matter if the software got less-than-ideal results, because the decision-maker was shielded by consensus. > First came the cloud, then came SaaS. SaaS—with its monthly billing cycles and lightweight implementation processes Maybe the implementation process for Capiche is simple, but it looks like a reallly narrowly focussed CRM tool. But a Saas ERP is still a huge undertaking for a business. In fact whether to have it hosted on or off site is quite frankly a very small part of the complication. > First, and perhaps most significantly, he days of central IT making the buying decision for every person in a company started to fade away. It started with a trend called BYOA (Bring Your Own App) Yes I see teams using Slack, Trello and Basecamp themselves. But these are nothing like the scale of an Enterprise application. It is equivalent to suggesting that since the marketing team managed to sign up to facebook themselves, why not let them do a Netsuite or SAP installation. > Today, all it takes is a few people in an organization to abandon WebEx for Zoom in a few clicks. > Twilio pioneered the concept of “developer evangelism.” They hired engineers for the sole purpose of travelling the world and meeting developers at hackathons and meetups Sure, in a technology company this can happen. In the rest of the world you need support. When Zoom doesn't work with the conference room hardware noone calls Zoom, they call IT. When a client wont install on a PC because of the software execution policy they call IT. > It also means that the days of “set it and forget it” enterprise contracts are gone. After a vendor closes an enterprise customer, they no longer can count on years upon years of lock-in. Again, only with small add on tools like Slack, not with CRM or ERP. When you move to an ERP you are expecting to pay out a load of money for a 10+ year project. With Saas there is slightly less upfront, and a lot more on-going cost. I'm afraid the writer either has no understanding of what enterprise wide software does, or is just twisting the facts to get a blog out of it.
debt 7y ago
I can save ya even more time and you can just call business software: software. It’s 2019, software is the business. There’s no need for the redundant “business” prepended to it.
nailer 7y ago
> Twilio pioneered the concept of “developer evangelism.” They hired engineers for the sole purpose of travelling the world and meeting developers at hackathons and meetups. Their goal wasn’t to sell Twilio’s products—it was to help developers with whatever they were building, give away swag, and spread love in the developer community. Instead of shmoozing executives and analysts, they celebrated developers and the things they were building. I don't think this person met any Twilio developer evangelists. The goal was to sell Twilio’s products - they'd give a talk at JSconf eg showing off that you could send SMS reminders or validate phone numbers with Twilio. Yes this would help developers with whatever they were building, and yes Twilio is awesome, but the goal was clearly commercially motivated 'be awesome using our stuff' rather than just 'be awesome'.
- hardwaresofton 7y ago
  Developer evangelists are the social media influencers of the development world. Since the phrase "influencer" is viewed somewhat negatively, maybe guerilla marketer is a bit lighter. In theory, it's a low-tier dream job -- imagine if someone paid you X figures/year to build and show off cool stuff with technology Y (with the caveat that you own none of the IP). This kind of plays out as evangelists often build cool stuff or work on open source projects that massively benefit the relevant communities. In practice, however, I find that I am very skeptical of talks/articles created by evangelists because of the inherent bias and knowledge that it's just their job, and sometimes the content just isn't that good -- you're not hearing from the person that spent the last 5 days struggling with an obscure kernel bug, you're often hearing about plugging one or two technologies together to do some buzzword-heavy task. It's like corporate blogging/brand management that is common these days (my own personal blog is no exception to a certain extent, I do actively market myself through it) -- "Here's 5 awesome ways to use tool X that we either developed or consult for" -- most of the time you know the other shoe is going to drop and something is going to try to "convert" you somehow.
- buckminster 7y ago
  And Twilio didn't pioneer it. Microsoft have been doing developer evangelism for decades.
tinus_hn 7y ago
The rumors about enterprise software’s demise have been slightly exaggerated. Unfortunately.
alkonaut 7y ago
"Enterprise software" to me is anything huge bought by a huge company or government authority to run their business. Like a bank, airline or insurance company that have enormous bespoke ERP/CRM deployments. Something that typically runs on either a mainframe (back in the day) or now more likely an in-house datacenter with machines running Oracle and SAP and all that. The article is right: employees hate these systems. Always. But there are few ways to replace a bespoke CRM/ERP system with a few "loved" apps. I don't consider the "enterprise version" of a simple do-one-thing app as being "enterprise software". That's just end-user/consumer software with unlimited whatevers and an expensive support contract.
vikingcaffiene 7y ago
Having software choices foisted upon you from on high is a huge red flag IMO. Same thing with dress codes. Speaks to a culture of mediocrity and concern with things that don't matter. I've worked at a few such places. Never again if I can help it.
gumby 7y ago
It's just the cycle of history. This already happened in 2000 with wifi and department servers: people would buy wifi access points (apple really accelerated this) and hide them from I/T in the suspended ceilings. They'd buy file servers and hide them under secretaries' desks. I/T eventually wrested control of that infrastructure and it all became an Enterprise sale. Oh, actually earlier: analysts would buy their own Apple IIs with Visicalc and simply compute locally without having to deal with I/T. Eventually I/T figured out how to co-opt them and Microsoft's tales team rode to victory. etc.
effnorwood 7y ago
It’s isn’t. US Government is alive and well with enterprise software for the next 100 years.
pjmlp 7y ago
Only on the merry land of hipster coffee shops. Enterprise software is the only way to get paid for delivering developer tooling.
jacknews 7y ago
off-the-shelf enterprise software may (or may not) be dead. But enterprises now increasingly ARE software. They make it themselves, as their own secret sauce.

44 points by tablet 7y ago

wrnr 7y ago

It is? If so, the same market dynamics not are pushing people to pick service X by amazone/google/microsoft. Its a fools aren to compete with Atlassian on developer productivity software. Think you can find a better offering then their suite

msrpotus 7y ago

As long as companies use CRM and ERP systems, enterprise software is going to stick around. That’s just a fundamentally different proposition than one team starting to use Slack or Twilio.

zitterbewegung 7y ago

No, it is still alive. Processes for approving outside software still exist as is convincing stakeholders. Also, I don't think its a good idea to rely on startups for larger businesses because of the very fact they get acquired / acquihired or simply close down and you are left with no alternative. If it is a open source project with a company that offers a service and support contract then maybe but there are really large companies where Enterprise software still reigns.

harryf 7y ago

Unfortunately most SaaS companies today have got on a bandwagon of offering “enterprise” versions of their products which alienate those which brought them bottom up into a corporation in the first place. You can see it in the “pricing” page that goes exponential on the “enterprise” offer and requires calling a sales organization that takes days or weeks to respond (vs filling in a form and providing credit card details). Usually it looks something like this; - Free: $0 but limited - Private: $5 / month for some extra features but limited collaboration - Professional: $49 / month / user ... includes collaboration up to N users - Enterprise: insane pricing that needs board level approval and will cost your company $millions / year Free to Professional level I can kind of understand but in terms of scaling, the Enterprise is dumb. If you make me - a developer / designer / PM / etc have to kick off board level meetings to pay for this product, you already lost. SaaS companies need to keep their pricing scalable so that as their product goes “viral” in an enterprise, people with purchasing control up to $10000 / year in departments and groups across the corporation can keep paying by credit card without needing to get additional approval. Stop making work for your supporters

raverbashing 7y ago
Alienating? Possibly More alienating and expensive than some crap by SAP or IBM? Probably not. > a developer / designer / PM / etc have to kick off board level meetings to pay for this product, you already lost. Don't worry, you don't have to do it. Their sales team will do the job once you're at professional level.
- jimnotgym 7y ago
  SAP write some really good and very complicated software to do compicated things. It is not 'crap'. Their ERP offering is really solid. The anecodtes about SAP going wrong are imho due to implementation issues. There is nothing I have seen from the SAAS space that is close to doing what the fullblown SAP ERP products can do for a multinational, multicurrency manufacturer
devoply 7y ago
Joel Spolsky says anything more than 1k is too much and require approval. Has this amount now changed?
- harryf 7y ago
  That may be right. I’m in Switzerland where the first level of management usually gets a free pass on things up 5000K or 10000K
jcims 7y ago
Some enterprises justify the astronomical increase in spend because of the overhead required to consummate the commercial relationship.
- sethammons 7y ago
  Not sure why you are being down voted. We started integrating with a company everyone knows. Our $80/mo package totally suited their initial needs. They said they couldn't budget for such a small line item and required that we increase the price.

shadowtree 7y ago

Reads great at face value, but is literally just content marketing. Author took some observations from the last decade (I guess Salesforce is big now, huh?) and added some VC Twitter blurbs about “consumerization”. Listening to VC Twitter is funny though, turns out they’re money lenders first and foremost, not in the business of actually writing and selling software. So it’s a game of telephone, with a 8-12 months delay, but high dose of posturing. The main distinction between SMB and Enterprise is not the software itself, hasn’t been in a looong time. It’s sales. And there, enterprise is alive and happy, getting even more centralized, globalized and thereby different. The main driver for this? Security and Compliance. CIOs will get fired if: They allow a Maersk-style ransomware disaster OR They don’t have their shit in order when the GDPR-style audit rolls in. Marketing automation got concentrated into 2 cloud players now (SFDC, Adobe) for that reason. The new enterprise. And SMB that operates internationally now buys whatever the big guys are having. Yes, enterprise is dead - for anyone trying to sell into it with SMB techniques. Slack has strong headwind because of it, their enterprise plan is a) insanely priced and even worse b) backed by a totally inept sales team when it comes to “enterprise”.

nathanaldensr 7y ago

This is a crap article--a rant. It presents no convincing evidence of the premise. If enterprise software is dead, why am I seeing its use all around me? My anecdotes hold just as much weight as the author's. Oh, and the author has something to sell, too.

gchokov 7y ago
My thoughts exactly. Living and breathing in Enterprise software world. The author is clueless.
cannonedhamster 7y ago
As my former startup now subsidiary is being forced to abandon working products for inferior ones in the name of "enterprise" or some box checking version of "security" I also agree that this notion of enterprise software going away is a bit silly. They tried to hook some new enterprise ready expenses tool in and force us to use it. It exposed the entire pay structure of the company to anyone who wanted to know. We were back in the old product that worked before the official launch of the new one. We have had numerous people leave because of literally arbitrary policies like buying a meal at an airport is covered but buying a water or snacks is not a covered expense. I.e. your always forced to the most expensive option and in the same breath being told to reduce travel expenses. There now my rant is anecdotal too.

wil421 7y ago

I agree with the part about SaaS taking hold in the enterprise. ServiceNow, Workday, O365 and being pushed by hard by KPMG/Accenture and all the other consulting vultures. I’ve been cleaning up the SaaS messes left by consultants for the last 5 years. Developers do have a voice now but in my experience it is quickly over looked by VPs and above, especially if consultants are around. Slack is a better product but the VPs and up are already paying for O365. To them Microsoft Teams is much more attractive (and a worse product). Microsoft knows this and has been pushing it hard. Don’t agree with this rant of an article.

buboard 7y ago

What has changed is that it is now possible to make chat and video apps in the browser and ppl take advantage of it. There's also a lot of money thrown in startups, and an SaaS for every tiny bit of workflow. Let's see if this "wave" is sustainable without a VC bubble.

cannonedhamster 7y ago
Short answer no. No business is sustainable without startup money from somewhere. The problem is the wealthy have so much money and there's not enough money at the ground level to buy the new products so without dumping money into crazy new ideas they can't ever grow their money at the top. It's a self limiting factor of capitalism, for the system to function properly money must be evenly distributed amongst those with needs to be fulfilled.

jimnotgym 7y ago

I would like to challenge this article on several points > a stark distinction existed between enterprise software (targeting Fortune 2000 companies) and the rest of business software (targeting mid-market and SMB). Not true. SMBs often use ERP systems which have all of the features mentioned next > Enterprise software was generally bought by CTOs, CIOs, and CEOs. They’d make a choice largely based on what the analyst firms told them, and were incentivized to make the safest possible choice, not the best choice. It didn’t matter much if their employees liked or hated the software, because they had no other choice. It didn’t matter if the software got less-than-ideal results, because the decision-maker was shielded by consensus. > First came the cloud, then came SaaS. SaaS—with its monthly billing cycles and lightweight implementation processes Maybe the implementation process for Capiche is simple, but it looks like a reallly narrowly focussed CRM tool. But a Saas ERP is still a huge undertaking for a business. In fact whether to have it hosted on or off site is quite frankly a very small part of the complication. > First, and perhaps most significantly, he days of central IT making the buying decision for every person in a company started to fade away. It started with a trend called BYOA (Bring Your Own App) Yes I see teams using Slack, Trello and Basecamp themselves. But these are nothing like the scale of an Enterprise application. It is equivalent to suggesting that since the marketing team managed to sign up to facebook themselves, why not let them do a Netsuite or SAP installation. > Today, all it takes is a few people in an organization to abandon WebEx for Zoom in a few clicks. > Twilio pioneered the concept of “developer evangelism.” They hired engineers for the sole purpose of travelling the world and meeting developers at hackathons and meetups Sure, in a technology company this can happen. In the rest of the world you need support. When Zoom doesn't work with the conference room hardware noone calls Zoom, they call IT. When a client wont install on a PC because of the software execution policy they call IT. > It also means that the days of “set it and forget it” enterprise contracts are gone. After a vendor closes an enterprise customer, they no longer can count on years upon years of lock-in. Again, only with small add on tools like Slack, not with CRM or ERP. When you move to an ERP you are expecting to pay out a load of money for a 10+ year project. With Saas there is slightly less upfront, and a lot more on-going cost. I'm afraid the writer either has no understanding of what enterprise wide software does, or is just twisting the facts to get a blog out of it.

debt 7y ago

I can save ya even more time and you can just call business software: software. It’s 2019, software is the business. There’s no need for the redundant “business” prepended to it.

nailer 7y ago

> Twilio pioneered the concept of “developer evangelism.” They hired engineers for the sole purpose of travelling the world and meeting developers at hackathons and meetups. Their goal wasn’t to sell Twilio’s products—it was to help developers with whatever they were building, give away swag, and spread love in the developer community. Instead of shmoozing executives and analysts, they celebrated developers and the things they were building. I don't think this person met any Twilio developer evangelists. The goal was to sell Twilio’s products - they'd give a talk at JSconf eg showing off that you could send SMS reminders or validate phone numbers with Twilio. Yes this would help developers with whatever they were building, and yes Twilio is awesome, but the goal was clearly commercially motivated 'be awesome using our stuff' rather than just 'be awesome'.

hardwaresofton 7y ago
Developer evangelists are the social media influencers of the development world. Since the phrase "influencer" is viewed somewhat negatively, maybe guerilla marketer is a bit lighter. In theory, it's a low-tier dream job -- imagine if someone paid you X figures/year to build and show off cool stuff with technology Y (with the caveat that you own none of the IP). This kind of plays out as evangelists often build cool stuff or work on open source projects that massively benefit the relevant communities. In practice, however, I find that I am very skeptical of talks/articles created by evangelists because of the inherent bias and knowledge that it's just their job, and sometimes the content just isn't that good -- you're not hearing from the person that spent the last 5 days struggling with an obscure kernel bug, you're often hearing about plugging one or two technologies together to do some buzzword-heavy task. It's like corporate blogging/brand management that is common these days (my own personal blog is no exception to a certain extent, I do actively market myself through it) -- "Here's 5 awesome ways to use tool X that we either developed or consult for" -- most of the time you know the other shoe is going to drop and something is going to try to "convert" you somehow.
buckminster 7y ago
And Twilio didn't pioneer it. Microsoft have been doing developer evangelism for decades.

tinus_hn 7y ago

The rumors about enterprise software’s demise have been slightly exaggerated. Unfortunately.

alkonaut 7y ago

"Enterprise software" to me is anything huge bought by a huge company or government authority to run their business. Like a bank, airline or insurance company that have enormous bespoke ERP/CRM deployments. Something that typically runs on either a mainframe (back in the day) or now more likely an in-house datacenter with machines running Oracle and SAP and all that. The article is right: employees hate these systems. Always. But there are few ways to replace a bespoke CRM/ERP system with a few "loved" apps. I don't consider the "enterprise version" of a simple do-one-thing app as being "enterprise software". That's just end-user/consumer software with unlimited whatevers and an expensive support contract.

vikingcaffiene 7y ago

Having software choices foisted upon you from on high is a huge red flag IMO. Same thing with dress codes. Speaks to a culture of mediocrity and concern with things that don't matter. I've worked at a few such places. Never again if I can help it.

gumby 7y ago

It's just the cycle of history. This already happened in 2000 with wifi and department servers: people would buy wifi access points (apple really accelerated this) and hide them from I/T in the suspended ceilings. They'd buy file servers and hide them under secretaries' desks. I/T eventually wrested control of that infrastructure and it all became an Enterprise sale. Oh, actually earlier: analysts would buy their own Apple IIs with Visicalc and simply compute locally without having to deal with I/T. Eventually I/T figured out how to co-opt them and Microsoft's tales team rode to victory. etc.

effnorwood 7y ago

It’s isn’t. US Government is alive and well with enterprise software for the next 100 years.

pjmlp 7y ago

Only on the merry land of hipster coffee shops. Enterprise software is the only way to get paid for delivering developer tooling.

jacknews 7y ago

off-the-shelf enterprise software may (or may not) be dead. But enterprises now increasingly ARE software. They make it themselves, as their own secret sauce.