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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> We are doing a developer platform for enterprise to build internal software

> for enterprise

I mentioned this product to my enterprise boss and his enterprise answer was "we can't easily get this approved by tech-selection committee for no good reason" (and that would have just been to have an off-to-the-side proof-of-concept instance or two running in our sandbox k8s cluster let alone actually bringing it onboard as a paid service)

How do enterprise users not already have the functionality you are offering covered one way or another and why would they migrate off of what they have to what you are offering? What kind of business today doesn't have something like ActiveBatch, AWS/Azure functionality with massive cloud support contracts, etc. already?

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You can't win every contracts but the market we're after is immense and so even a small percentage of enterprises being more daring is sufficient.

But the argument is true for any enterprise software, you cannot be small and sell to enterprise (or you must have amazing product market fit), that's where open-source comes in.

We have overlap with many existing products, but we are the only one to provide such product, with emphasis on DX and excellent performance and scalability, and to be open-source. We do currently have a few big enterprise customers and many enterprise open-source users. It's a lot easier to get approval since they get it for free and it's fully self-hostable and air-grappable. Once they have tried it on a few non-essential workflow and see the benefits, then they are more motivated to make a case internally. Wide net, some catches until it becomes ubiquitous.

I happen to be a really strong believer in open-source so it's not just an adoption strategy but I think it happens to be also fortunately the best strategy for such infra level software.

Whether enterprise or not, the criticism is still fair: the value proposition needs to be super clear. I’m missing this.

Your comments make it a bit more clear, but the big question (as an Airflow user) I have is: why would I want to migrate?

A big question for an enterprise customer is typically: will I save money with this? In developer productivity, in resource costs, or something else? Can you unlock new things that were previously not possible?

I wish you guys the best.

Question is - what are you using airflow for? My experience with airflow have been in data ETL, and if so you are not the target for something like windmill.

The target would most likely be automating HR, Finance and IT workflows and tearing down the shadow IT web of crazy integrations taking place at every larger organization I’ve ever experienced.

We’re talking “new hire” workflow for example, which at my current employer is about 25 activities in a workflow.

All assets have to be lifecycle managed in an enterprise and automated workflows will help you scale that. Far too many enterprises have a lot of people shuffle excel files and emails around to fulfill processes and workflows.

Airflow is a beast imho and usually not used in the same niche IME.

Just guessing with no background experience on windmill, maybe to support reactive workflows. Airflow does not have a good proposition on that front. Sensors are a workaround and not performant.

A problem is that you're trading 'Compete by offering one thing this company needs' with 'Compete by offering 5 things this company needs, 4 of which are in various stages of entrenchment at the organization already'.

You'll be up against incumbent software that populates teams of workers at the company who have a vested interest in their livelihoods not being taken away, who have the support of whatever commercial organization wants to keep their business. All to provide that +1 value-add you can't even focus on as much as you should due to your efforts being split to compete with multiple other products.

Do one thing well, FIRST. Make it easy to integrate with and build integrations from. THEN expand into the supporting ecosystem.

I’ve been the person in a position to recommend enterprise solutions and have those recommendations taken.

I’ve also been the person on the other side of that relationship, helping potential customers make a case that my product is worthy of their software/services gatekeeper’s consideration.

There is often high motivation to bring in a smaller/newer tool, because the existing solutions are not scalable, or are missing a critical feature, or require a team of specialized people to make it work, or has onerous licensing costs, etc.

“Shadow IT” is also a very real thing. Someone’s boss is frustrated with the bureaucracy and timeframe for bringing something in and so they just throw it on a corp card or install it themselves and ask for forgiveness later. This happens everywhere and is often the precursor to forcing the product to become officially blessed because by now it’s supporting production workloads and has proven its worth.

This particular space is still ripe for innovation. Very few of the products that target this kind of tool building approach are close to finished and each has its quirks.

> There is often high motivation to bring in a smaller/newer tool

I must be misunderstanding the definition of "enterprise" here. I can't picture any of the 3 enterprise companies I've ever worked for adapting any sort of product like this.

I’ve worked with many of the largest companies across quite a few verticals in a product management capacity. Many large enterprises (think 200K+ employees) still have pockets of tool building and automation springing up everywhere. Big names you’ve heard of.

I’d be willing to bet money that this was happening where you were, but you may not have been exposed to it. It often shocks IT management what they find when turning on software auto-discovery and inventory tools.

These tools are often employed in operations and other non-core-to-the-business departments to simplify/automate busy work happening there.

I’ve worked for years implementing tools like this in enterprises.

My most fond memory was introducing a workflow platform to an enterprise with a fully outsourced IT-ops department - it was ruining everyone else in terms of cost, speed and quality.

The security dept (this was a large bank) was gridlocked in this setup and wanted the ability to automate their way out of the sourcing mess.

I spent roughly three months building a few “hot path” workflows important to them which enabled them to take the ownership back of the processes and save an incredible amount of time and money.

Encapsulating these integrations as workflows makes them observable and measurable. The customer had in the first quarter after deployment 10’s of thousands runs and avg time to completion went from 2 weeks to 2 days. It also cut out an rather expensive middle man.

And this is not the worst enterprise customer I’ve worked with. One hade 4000 Windows servers manually provisioned and managed. There’s low hanging fruit out there!

You basically trade agility and quality for competence, unfortunately a lot of enterprise IT shops are not willing or capable to do so.

They have “not only one way or the other” - they have “all the ways” and this is exactly the problem you want a solution like this to fill.

We’re talking backoffice/cost-center workflows in IT, finance and HR - absolutely not business profit processes mind you.

A tool such as this can help an IT department take ownership of integrations and workflows, building them in a framework that can improve speed and quality. It will help with organizational scalability.

The alternative is in my experience a giant mess of integrations lacking ownership and observability.

Every large enterprise needs “something” like windmill, they might just not know it.

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