The Disambiguation of Enterprise Software

SaaS is only part of the story

Enterprise Software: The word evokes feelings of large monolith software packages sold by an Armani suit wearing salesman delivered in pallets of servers( whats a software sale with no hardware add-on’s?). Except none of this is relevant in 2014. What has happened to enterprise software over the last several years has been interesting. One of the trends has been the move to SaaS which a large number of traditional enterprise software players have mediocre replicas either by acquisition or by rolling their own versions. The second trend is a lot harder if not impossible to replicate which is , Enterprise software is now broken down into piece parts delivered by multiple vendors leveraging an open architecture. For ex: lets consider a use case to build a system for hospitals to receive real time notifications from sensors on the premises and make automated phone calls/SMS and display a real time dashboard on a mobile app. Back in the day, this would be some monolithic system that did everything half assed requiring multiple maintenance contracts. Today with services like Parse, PubNub and Twilio, a similar service can be built with decoupled architecture within a few weeks(if not days). Such services also enable traditional non-IT groups to leverage applications that would have in the past been a source of conflict between marketing and IT. We are still in the early stages of this transformation. Expect to see a plethora of such services go after every component of legacy enterprise software systems.