Enterprise Software Is Dead
capiche.com
capiche.com
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
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.
Usually Enterprise has all features of Professional, but has high or unlimited number of actions included (e.g. API calls per month), so they leave this door for negotiations about acceptable prices to increase chance of new customer acquisition.
By the time you hit the cost discussion on AWS, the value you’re getting out of it is hopefully self-evident.
And yes AWS has sales people but most of the time they’re acting as consultants and “helpers” rather than someone you need to negotiate with.
Think of it this way, when you are paying people to acquire software for your organizations, they justify a salary. To do that, they need to show they’re adding value to the process. The easiest way of them doing that is to show they negotiated a chunk of dollars that in aggregation exceeds their salary, which means they need to show they knocked $10k, $25k, $100k here and there off of software. Selling it for $10k won’t get them the numbers they’d like to see.
The more valuable aspect of procurement is security evaluations. Somebody has to make the SaaS software that an org is adopting will be around for a while, is reasonably secure, and not some fly by night operation.
Only companies that operate at a massive scale can offer pricing like AWS, but until niche SaaS software can become more of a commodity (or the evaluation of it), the seemingly odd world of “Enterprise for 2 magnitudes more” will persist to make it worth the buyers time.
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.
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'.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
Enterprise software is the only way to get paid for delivering developer tooling.
> 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.
But enterprises now increasingly ARE software. They make it themselves, as their own secret sauce.
It’s 2019, software is the business. There’s no need for the redundant “business” prepended to it.