Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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