The Enterprise: I’m Not Sexy And I Know It

Biggest problem in selling to enterprises:<p>The CEO talks about wanting scalable cloud solutions using hypervisor technology without block-based attached storage.<p>The people using the system are treating it as Excel with a slightly crappier UI.<p>In most large organizations, the problem isn't providing a way to let their large amount of data scale. The problem is getting people to even input that data into a useful format so that it can be analyzed at all. You will spend man-months designing a system that handles all edge cases only to find out that they can't or won't even enter any useful configuration and support data to make it usable.<p>Everyone wants to talk about how your resource allocation and planning algorithms work with mobile technician work forces. No one can answer whether these fancy systems actually save costs or increase efficiency. <i>And they don't care either</i>.<p>We sell software to enterprises. It is a kafka-esque nightmare.

Spot on.<p>This is what many startups miss when promoting technologies to Fortune 500 companies.<p>In the enterprises usually you don't change stuff for the sake of it, unless you're trying to keep the budget for the next year and need to avoid having it reduced.<p>As such it is easier to introduce incremental changes as radical new ideas.

The main problem of enterprise startups isn't to find the right problem-domain but rather the sheer amount of work power it needs to find and solve the edge cases. Big Co uses a lot of Custom Software for a reason... The bigger it gets, the more custom solutions they use. SAP and Oracle employ a boatload of people just for that reason.<p>If you're interested in enterprise startups you should start looking for a really specialised piece of workflow that is common among huge company's and try to solve that in its entirety better than the existing solution.

Wait, this sounded familiar: <a href="http://danshipper.com/b2b-is-unsexy-and-i-know-it" rel="nofollow">http://danshipper.com/b2b-is-unsexy-and-i-know-it</a>

I guess this may not have originally been written for tech crunch but it comes across as intentionally opaque for a general tech website. Wouldn't be to hard to extend on the acronyms and provide some links that explain them to a general tech audience.

I don't agree with the statement that ERP will not move into the cloud. The same was said about CRM (omgwtfbbq it is our customer data) - and look how the market has changed.<p>SAP themselves are pushing HANA, which is seriously cool tech and will be the foundation of moving big ERP into the cloud. A bit interesting how in-memory architecture is not discussed at all here at HN. Started in pure BI/Analytics with tools like Qlikview, but now it is growing up.<p>See here: <a href="http://www12.sap.com/solutions/technology/in-memory-computing-platform/hana/overview/index.epx" rel="nofollow">http://www12.sap.com/solutions/technology/in-memory-computin...</a><p>ORA is a bit on the slow side, they are pushing better bundles with hardware instead (exadata).

How much longer until people actually get fired for choosing IBM, SAP, Oracle?

<i>Application-level SLAs without giving up the economics of multi-tenant:</i><p>Any one who wants to both have his cake and eat it is destined for disappointment.