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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

> "So unless your product legitimately only sells to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple, you probably don’t need to be 'enterprise ready'"

What in the actual fsck? Check out this list of companies ranked by the number of employees they have - https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-o.... Okay, Amazon is #2 - but notice the top 100 doesn't include Apple. There's a lot more to business than FAANG.

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If you're selling enterprise software then the important number is not "number of employees" but "number of employees who would use your software". In large retail, manufacturing, oil etc companies they have a lot of software of course, but each person is typically accessing 4 or 5 apps at most (email, office suite, HR, etc). In FAANG companies each employee involved in software development is often using closer to 30 apps (project management, comms, source control, bug tracking, telemetry, server management, i18n, etc). It makes sense to focus on FAANG companies if you're producing enterprise software simply because they buy more of it. That obviously doesn't mean there isn't a huge market outside of that as well.

You’re better off focusing on banks, oil and gas, etc. Anything that uses a lot of technology to get its job done and operates at a massive scale. FAANG are a very small part of the ecosystem and tend to build vs buy.

A major bank employs between 50,000-10,000 software engineers and in the 250,000-50,000 employee range. Netflix has only 11,000 employees of all types.

Task workers use 5 apps, but if you’re one of them, that might be 10,000 people.

I knew a guy who sold a $2M solution to track MSDS sheets in a prison system. Stupid simple application.

>The buyer is typically a VP, a director, possibly C suite, depending on what you’re selling

If a company has VPs buying things surely they have some sort of internal vendor management that usually involves accounting/legal/compliance reviews. Being enterprise ready means you have the roles/documentation/process/procedure to answer those questions

Although each of those companies is made up of 5 to 50 mini-companies, each with more business units/products/services. You have to understand which of them you're selling to, what they need, how they will use your product. Are two completely different tiny departments gonna hem and haw over trying your product, or will the whole org use your software? You might end up supporting a dozen users or 500,000. Will you still have to support the same features, or can the tiny teams get away with less? Is it even worth supporting the enterprise features if your product fit is smaller teams and you wouldn't get a large-scale contract anyway?

I agree. The last three companies I worked for were large health care companies. They spend millions on SaaS products.

right like any software deployed by Zebra is probably going to get used by every retail company and warehouse in the USA.

Now I don't know how much of the software on my TC26 actually comes from Zebra but, pretty sure, it's not zero.

ASSA ABLOY software is probably everywhere there's a door these days.

I don't know who the players in HVAC are but considering that a lot of HVAC/lighting control for like Target/Walmart are remotely controlled there's definitely somebody with tens of thousands of deployments.

Not to mention EdTech shit like BlackBoard, that gets deployed to every god damned school in the country

And good luck selling enterprise software to Apple, Google and Facebook, they all already have some custom internal softwares for everything

No. They use ADP, Concur, WordPress (check out AWS official blogs), Salesforce and third party SaaS products just like everyone else.

Yeah, they know the "keep everything default as much as you can" rule better than anyone else with SaaS providers. What a load of gobshite.

Are you saying they should keep everything in house? I can tell you from personal experience that the external facing services from one of the major cloud providers handle spikes in traffic and has much better uptime than many internal systems.

Nope. Microsoft (for example) use SAP. It would be crazy for them to spend millions building something similar to SAP.

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