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Does it need to? I am going to take the unpopular stance on this and say no... enterprise software does not need to be innovative, it just needs to work. redha

by migpwr 19y ago

Does it need to? I am going to take the unpopular stance on this and say no... enterprise software does not need to be innovative, it just needs to work. redhat, vmware, oracle, microsoft etc... they all deliver what their customers need, not stuff that impresses magazine editors. The software keeps steadily getting better and although they don't have every whizbang feature in the book, they get the job done... that's what matters. Do you have a better, faster way to do backups? A solution to documentation everyone hates so much? We'll pay for it if you've got it... after someone else goes first.

neilc 19y ago
There are hard problems in enterprise software that require innovative solutions. For example, data warehousing is crying out for better technology, and as a result, there are a multitude of startups building new technology to compete with the established players. Stream processing is another area with a ton of innovation, as is business intelligence/analytics, virtualization, security, etc. There's tons of innovation around financial services: building systems to facilitate automatic trading systems based on financial models. One important difference between these markets and the typical consumer startup is that enterprises are inherently more conservative, and for good reason. You need to be able to offer an enterprise a lot of value, in exchange for the inherent risk of going with a startup with unproven technology. That means your value proposition needs to be compelling: you need to solve a real problem, and effectively allow the customer to make more money than they're paying for your software. Frankly, I think saying "there's not much innovation in enterprise software" just indicates how much of an echo chamber the online startup community is. There is plenty of innovation, it is just rarely described by TC, Om, and the rest.
- mattculbreth 19y ago
  Good post. This forum is slanted heavily towards consumer-based web apps. Certainly nothing wrong with that, and I'm a big user myself. But I'm not sure that there's really a lot of experience here working in the enterprise space. The ages alone (from another recent thread) would seem to back that up. That said, there's some dreadfully boring, stodgy software out there that companies spend quite a bit of money buying. My startup is aiming directly at this space (BI, as you've pointed out).
- bsaunder 19y ago
  Having worked in an enterprise environment in the last several years (and trying hard not to get sucked into the process), it sure seems to me that a lot of the problems with enterprise software are self inflicted wounds. In fact I think if their (our) IT groups actually solved the real problems themselves (the ones their business users cared about) rather than building framework on top of framework with bloated middlewear based on a dozen standardized acronyms, enterprise applications would be much leaner and cheaper. I think there's a lot of reinvented wheels and overdesigned architecures in enterprise application build circles. Their users don't care about that.

by migpwr 19y ago

neilc 19y ago

There are hard problems in enterprise software that require innovative solutions. For example, data warehousing is crying out for better technology, and as a result, there are a multitude of startups building new technology to compete with the established players. Stream processing is another area with a ton of innovation, as is business intelligence/analytics, virtualization, security, etc. There's tons of innovation around financial services: building systems to facilitate automatic trading systems based on financial models. One important difference between these markets and the typical consumer startup is that enterprises are inherently more conservative, and for good reason. You need to be able to offer an enterprise a lot of value, in exchange for the inherent risk of going with a startup with unproven technology. That means your value proposition needs to be compelling: you need to solve a real problem, and effectively allow the customer to make more money than they're paying for your software. Frankly, I think saying "there's not much innovation in enterprise software" just indicates how much of an echo chamber the online startup community is. There is plenty of innovation, it is just rarely described by TC, Om, and the rest.

mattculbreth 19y ago
Good post. This forum is slanted heavily towards consumer-based web apps. Certainly nothing wrong with that, and I'm a big user myself. But I'm not sure that there's really a lot of experience here working in the enterprise space. The ages alone (from another recent thread) would seem to back that up. That said, there's some dreadfully boring, stodgy software out there that companies spend quite a bit of money buying. My startup is aiming directly at this space (BI, as you've pointed out).
bsaunder 19y ago
Having worked in an enterprise environment in the last several years (and trying hard not to get sucked into the process), it sure seems to me that a lot of the problems with enterprise software are self inflicted wounds. In fact I think if their (our) IT groups actually solved the real problems themselves (the ones their business users cared about) rather than building framework on top of framework with bloated middlewear based on a dozen standardized acronyms, enterprise applications would be much leaner and cheaper. I think there's a lot of reinvented wheels and overdesigned architecures in enterprise application build circles. Their users don't care about that.