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Comment by davidjgraph | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of SaaS articles in an Enterprise selling article list. I'm curious how many SaaS products have broken the Enterprise market that people know of? And by Enterprise, I mean at least 6 figure annual price tag, not a few sales to 10 person teams that happen to work within an Enterprise. I guess Google for Work and Salesforce are two...

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ServiceNow - ITSM / ITOM Workday - HCM / ERP NetSuite - ERP, Commerce, CRM

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The incumbents they've displaced are insanely horrendous pieces of crap (I will name none of them) and as a technical person they are all light years ahead. People that badly implemented a previous technology stack are likely to mess it up again though (see CMDB implementations). SOAP services that at least kind of work are even a god-send in this market let alone something resembling REST. The sales cycles for these stacks previously were so long that entire generations of software came and went along with architectural patterns.

The list is very long. HR applications across the board are generally very expensive, so you'll easily hit six figures for a business with just hundreds, not thousands, of employees.

This is why the exciting new breed of start-ups in this space (payroll, ATS, HRIS, etc) are making a killing—amazing profit margins, even when you dramatically undercut the established players.

Especially when the established players:

1. Have huge bloated software that is hard to add features to, support, or reason about

2. Are based on a decade or more old software (at best)

3. Are being undercut by software that does probably less than 10% of what they offer, because nobody needs the other 90% of shit they pack in (but did because they added some customization or "feature" to the product whenever a big client came online due to some slimy sales guy)

The beauty of all the macro trends in the enterprise right now (cloud, big data, BYOD, etc) are that they're not just buzz words. They've been forcing functions for large corporations to move off legacy incumbents who can't keep up and to leverage startup tech across all areas of their business and IT infrastructure.

Check out www.work-bench.com/startups for a list of a bunch of companies selling true enterprise-class deals and doing a great job at it.

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