{"id":225,"date":"2009-05-14T11:38:01","date_gmt":"2009-05-14T15:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=225"},"modified":"2009-05-14T11:38:01","modified_gmt":"2009-05-14T15:38:01","slug":"inflexible-process-meets-immovable-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/inflexible-process-meets-immovable-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Inflexible Process meets Immovable Software"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.crv.com\/team\/devdutt_yellurkar\">Devdutt Yellurkar<\/a> (at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crv.com\">CRV<\/a>) and I were comparing enterprise software war stories and notes on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Software_as_a_service\">SaaS<\/a> opportunities (he did CRV&#8217;s recent investment in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zendesk.com\">ZenDesk<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Enterprise_software\">enterprise software<\/a> business model is a tough one.\u00a0 Large organizations frequently need custom features, and with project investments of millions or tens of millions of dollars, companies expect the solution to fit their operations and processes.\u00a0 As a result, many enterprise software companies were more like professional services businesses that happened to have some software, than the other way around.<\/p>\n<p>But there&#8217;s an interesting angle for SaaS:\u00a0 the lower price points make organizations more willing to accept the feature set &#8220;as-is&#8221;, and adapt their business to the software.\u00a0\u00a0 If the hosted software costs (say) $10k\/year, it&#8217;s hard to justify $500k of customization work.<\/p>\n<p>This drives another effect:\u00a0 SaaS offerings can focus on the core features that actually get used.\u00a0 Many enterprise software solutions turn into bloatware:\u00a0 the feature set evolves to an aggregated super-set of all possible customer features.\u00a0\u00a0 Worse, after the purchase decision, many customers end up using a sub-set of what they originally thought they needed.\u00a0\u00a0 This is why the product manager&#8217;s job is hell:\u00a0\u00a0 the product has 100 features, only 40 matter to any given customer in the sales process, and only 10 get actually used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Devdutt Yellurkar (at CRV) and I were comparing enterprise software war stories and notes on SaaS opportunities (he did CRV&#8217;s recent investment in ZenDesk). The enterprise software business model is a tough one.\u00a0 Large organizations frequently need custom features, and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/inflexible-process-meets-immovable-software\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}