I think one of your best options to to target smaller, specific problems, and sell and 'off the shelf' (as much as possible) solution to small businesses that aren't big enough clients for the giant gorillas of the current space.<p>As for what type of problems, I think you need to subdivide what the large ERP systems do, and make niche products. For example, a company I worked for in college was a small manufacturer and were trying and failing to keep track of raw material inventory via Quickbooks. On one hand, the inventory needs to be quantified in a dollar amount in quickbooks, but more importantly, they need to be able to use real inventory management functions. Ideally, they would (and probably could've) bought some package just for tracking inventory in and out, but also had an ODBC connection for Quickbooks to see how much the current inventory is worth.<p>Warehouse Management Systems are similar. Lots of providers at varying levels of cost and complexity, but I haven't seen to many that I can jump into an app store and buy. Of course, the real complexity is that every business has wildly different needs, and even two businesses in the same space will manage processes completely differently. Mods and customization tends to be a big deal. Also, consultants are constantly fighting to be the middleman in between the software providers and the end customers.<p>These are just a couple reasons I think it can be tough to break into the markets that Oracle, SAP, etc are in.<p>Also, I think there's a good reason that there are tons of tables and menus in enterprise software. There is a ton of structured data there, so it ends up being the easiest way to show it. Simplifying features and interfaces is a tough sell, because as soon as you think you have things down to a minimum set of 'what really needs to be there', your customer will say, "oh, no. We REALLY need to be able to do x,y,z". Okay, so those make the cut, too. Then the next customer says, "We have a lot of exceptions to the standard process," and next thing you know there are a million menus and options.