Re:Can You Build An Enterprise Only Web App?
by tptacek on Friday September 12, 2008 @06:49PM
(#302780)
The only hard analysis in this post is that enterprises don't adopt corporate IM; they just use AOL IM instead.
First, enterprises do adopt corporate IM. For instance, Notes shops use SameTime. Microsoft shops use whatever comes with LiveMeeting. You don't pay attention to these, because enterprises don't adopt IM from startups. I'm surprised when I meet enterprise IT people who don't have some kind of internal IM.
Second, enterprises don't simply use AOL Instant Messenger; take any 10 of my clients, and 8 of them don't even allow their users to connect to OSCAR (and 4 of those filter GMail as well).
Finally, Twitter isn't IM. Nobody really knows what Twitter is yet. If you had done this same analysis for the retail Internet a year ago, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that Twitter is a stupid idea even for home users. But then, Twitter happens anyways.
Re:Can You Build An Enterprise Only Web App?
by dunsany on Friday September 12, 2008 @04:26PM
(#302656)
Yup. Already did and made (and continue to make) millions on it. The Enterprise is a vertical and the app serves that vertical and that vertical has deep pockets.
Re:Can You Build An Enterprise Only Web App?
by tptacek on Friday September 12, 2008 @06:43PM
(#302775)
You mean hosted solutions besides:
* sales/CRM (SalesForce),
* financials (ADP, SurePayroll),
* HR (PeopleSoft),
* investor relations (Morningstar), or
* security (Qualys).
And that's for web apps. Look inside any large enterprise, and you find that outsourcing is all they do; everything's white-labeled for everyone else, and a huge chunk of the revenue comes from relationships between the giants.
Large enterprises routinely outsource core business process to hosted web apps. Where security is concerned, my guess is virtually every Fortune 500 company does what our clients do, which is to keep a small internal pen-test team and contract third-party security testers to "certify" apps before they get deployed.
And, of course, outsourced hosted apps aren't the definition of enterprise software. Take your Python app, wrap it in an Ubuntu VMware image, and give it an admin interface: now you have an enterprise web app.
First, enterprises do adopt corporate IM. For instance, Notes shops use SameTime. Microsoft shops use whatever comes with LiveMeeting. You don't pay attention to these, because enterprises don't adopt IM from startups. I'm surprised when I meet enterprise IT people who don't have some kind of internal IM.
Second, enterprises don't simply use AOL Instant Messenger; take any 10 of my clients, and 8 of them don't even allow their users to connect to OSCAR (and 4 of those filter GMail as well).
Finally, Twitter isn't IM. Nobody really knows what Twitter is yet. If you had done this same analysis for the retail Internet a year ago, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that Twitter is a stupid idea even for home users. But then, Twitter happens anyways.
Third,
* sales/CRM (SalesForce),
* financials (ADP, SurePayroll),
* HR (PeopleSoft),
* investor relations (Morningstar), or
* security (Qualys).
And that's for web apps. Look inside any large enterprise, and you find that outsourcing is all they do; everything's white-labeled for everyone else, and a huge chunk of the revenue comes from relationships between the giants.
Large enterprises routinely outsource core business process to hosted web apps. Where security is concerned, my guess is virtually every Fortune 500 company does what our clients do, which is to keep a small internal pen-test team and contract third-party security testers to "certify" apps before they get deployed.
And, of course, outsourced hosted apps aren't the definition of enterprise software. Take your Python app, wrap it in an Ubuntu VMware image, and give it an admin interface: now you have an enterprise web app.