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Comment by thinkcomp | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect to Aaron, and as someone who wants enterprise software to get the attention it deserves, this reads more like an ad for box.net than a compelling argument as to why enterprise is making a comeback. Of the few investments being made these days, venture capitalists are by and large investing in consumer products and "green" technology, and until they feel those markets are totally saturated I don't expect much will change.

It's also the rare twenty-something founder straight out of college in the Valley who knows anything about double-entry general ledger systems or what CIOs of Fortune 500 companies really spend time worrying about. When I see headlines about Oracle and SAP worrying about their profits, I'll be more convinced that something has changed.

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Agreed. Was hoping this article would give some advice on how to penetrate the enterprise market. Its much easier to grow in the consumer space than in the in enterprise space.

It seems that the hardest problem is getting the first enterprise buyer. I wish there were more articles discussing this valuable step.

That's a great point. Any ideas on how you might start educating entrepreneurs to know about these pain points? It seems that by the time you've seen this stuff, you're already at a point in your life where you require stability rather than living on ramen in a scrappy startup.

I wish I had an answer myself.

Well, I started keeping my own books with a pencil and paper when I was fifteen, and I started paying sales tax to the State of Ohio not long after. Suffice it to say I got an education in bookkeeping pretty quickly. I'm not sure I'd really recommend the same to any fifteen-year-old, but enterprise software is one of those things that is much easier to understand if you've run an enterprise before.

As for what CIOs (or CFOs) are thinking, you've got to talk to them. They (or if not them, their subordinates) belong to membership organizations. You've got to join them. It usually costs a lot of money.

+1 - this is the biggest reason why it seems so difficult to penetrate these markets.

Work in a large multinational enterprise for a while!

When I see headlines about Oracle and SAP worrying about their profits, I'll be more convinced that something has changed.

Megavendors may not worry much about their profits because they don't feel yet competition from startups. However this might change soon. One of my favorite enterprise-market startups is Vertica (www.vertica.com) - the product is just brilliant. I would expect in 3-5 years Vertica and some other analytical DBMSes (ParAccel, InfoBright etc.) to became serious players on enterprise market making IBM, Oracle and MS worry about their DBMS revenues.

One thing that Veritica could learn from consumer startups is how to build a website! Their front page tells me almost nothing about what they sell or what they do. After a couple of minutes of clicking, I gave up and read the Wikipedia site instead.

Palantir [1] does a much better job.

[1] http://www.palantir.com

Fully agree about Vertica's website - it should be redesigned for sure. The only small excuse for them is that they don't sell through website (contrary to consumer startups). Direct sales force and customer references do main part of this job (which is typical for enterprise market).

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