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.
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.<p>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;<p>- Free: $0 but limited<p>- Private: $5 / month for some extra features but limited collaboration<p>- Professional: $49 / month / user ... includes collaboration up to N users<p>- Enterprise: insane pricing that needs board level approval and will cost your company $millions / year<p>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.<p>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
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.
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.
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.<p>Developers do have a voice now but in my experience it is quickly over looked by VPs and above, especially if consultants are around.<p>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.<p>Don’t agree with this rant of an article.
> 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.<p>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'.
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”.<p>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.<p>The main distinction between SMB and Enterprise is not the software itself, hasn’t been in a looong time.<p>It’s sales.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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”.
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.
"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.<p>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.<p>I <i>don't</i> 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.
It's just the cycle of history.<p>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.<p>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.<p>etc.
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.
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
I would like to challenge this article on several points<p>> a stark distinction existed between enterprise software (targeting Fortune 2000 companies) and the rest of business software (targeting mid-market and SMB).<p>Not true. SMBs often use ERP systems which have all of the features mentioned next<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>> First came the cloud, then came SaaS. SaaS—with its monthly billing cycles and lightweight implementation processes<p>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.<p>> First, and perhaps most significantly, he days of central IT making the buying decision for every person in a company started to fade away.<p>It started with a trend called BYOA (Bring Your Own App)<p>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.<p>> Today, all it takes is a few people in an organization to abandon WebEx for Zoom in a few clicks.<p>> 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<p>Sure, in a technology company this can happen. In the rest of the world you need <i>support</i>. 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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
off-the-shelf enterprise software may (or may not) be dead.<p>But enterprises now increasingly ARE software. They make it themselves, as their own secret sauce.
I can save ya even more time and you can just call business software: software.<p>It’s 2019, software is the business. There’s no need for the redundant “business” prepended to it.