As for the market, various sources have the "enterprise software market", whatever that means, at somewhere around $100 billion to $300 billion. We also see companies trying over and over to do this kind of thing. The demand is clearly there.
Certainly the mandate "help run the business" is a wide concern, and that's an OK working definition of "enterprise", and what most existing solutions are trying to do. There are hundreds of interconnected concerns, lots of things to coordinate, etc.
There are other wide concerns, though. Almost anything in engineering and science. Take, for example, the question "how can we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?" which a lot of companies are asking (or being forced to ask). If you wanted to build a SAAS product for helping companies reduce their GHG, you've got a wide problem, because there are a thousand activities that can emit GHG, and any given company is going to be doing dozens of them at once. But each company is different. Each state and country thinks of things differently. You might not even have the same calculations state-to-state.
Hard problems in science and engineering are just naturally cross-disciplinary, meaning your system has to know a lot of things about a lot of subjects. There are just thousands of little complicating differences and factors. If you're trying to solve a problem like this, absolutely do not de-normalize your database.
I struggle with the value of low/no code vs learning to code and providing common libraries.
Nowadays there are bunch of regulations on handling user data that one cannot do without knowing but when these companies started that was not an issue.
My point is market for "wide" applications is huge but it is much more fragmented. Of Course SAP and Salesforce are taking cut in that by having "one app for everything"
To get contracts you have to have specialized knowledge in specific area that your SaaS app would provide more value than configuring some crappy version in SAP. So you cannot just make an app in your basement and watch people sign up, but you have to spend a lot of leg work getting customers. That is why it is not really "hot" area for startups, because there is a lot of good money there but not unicorn money and most likely you won't be able to have 2 or 3 different specialist niche products so you could diversify investment but you would have to commit to a niche which makes it also not really interesting for a lot of entrepreneurs who most likely would lie to jump to something more profitable when possible.
Just my experience, but essentially these target industries, not necessarily consumers or singular entities. Hence the term "enterprise". As someone who worked on a fairly reasonable ERP for academic purposes, even just calculating a GPA is extremely complicated in the backend:
* There are multiple schemes for calculating GPAs
* Each scheme needs to support multiple grading types (A-F, pass/fail, etc)
* Each scheme needs to support multiple rounding rules
* Displays of GPAs will need to be scaled properly based on the output context
* GPA values will need to be normalized for use in calculations in other parts of the system
* State legislatures mandate state-specific usages of GPAs which must be honored for legal compliance
* All GPA calculations must have historical context in case the rules changes so that old transcripts can be revived correctly
* Institutions themselves will have custom rules (maybe across schools or departments) for calculations which must be incorporated into everything else
* This pretty much has to work every time
I would compare this to most modern "tall" applications which would more-than-likely offer you maybe up to 3 different GPA options with some basic data syncing or something. They might offer multiple rounding types if they thought that far. These apps are generally extremely niche and typically work for very basic workloads. They can capture a lot of easy value for entry-level stuff but immediately fail at everything else.
What is the market for "wide" applications though? It seems like any particular business can only really support one or two of them, for some that will be SAP and for others it might be Salesforce (if they don't need much ERP), or (as you mentioned) some giant semi homebrewed Oracle thing.
Usually there is a legacy system which is failing but still runs the business, and a "next gen" system which is not ready yet (and might never be, because it only supports a small number of use cases from the old software and even with an army of BAs it's difficult to spec out all the things the old software is actually doing with any accuracy).
Or am I not quite getting the idea?