Rise of the Developer
Why The Enterprise Sales Game is Changing
We are witnessing a significant paradigm shift in how businesses evaluate and buy technology.
Influence, clout, and authority for technology purchases, which have long been shifting from IT to Line of Business (thanks to SAAS) , are now shifting to developers.
Entire technology categories are being disrupted by the rapid rise of developer focused platforms. Some examples:
- Datacenter via Amazon Web Services
- Communications via Twilio
- Payments via Stripe
- Email via Sendgrid
- Shipping via EasyPost
- Mobile Middleware via Firebase
These developer centric businesses are characterized by three key attributes:
- Cloud API’s
- Self-Service
- Pay-per-Use
The question is — how are these simple axioms changing the landscape of how enterprise IT decisions are made?
Cloud API’s empower developers with capabilities historically reserved for central IT
Simple API’s, that abstract highly complex and arcane technology stacks, allow developers to tap into domain areas previously unimaginable — all while using their existing skill sets. And by virtue of being in the cloud, there are no physical constraints to access. Take a typical .Net web developer, for example, who is looking to customize payment and shipping workflows of his e-commerce application. Historically, he might defer to central IT and procurement to explore possibilities, as these are areas outside his core expertise (web development). Today, however, he can tap into API services like Stripe (for payments) and EasyPost (for shipping), without having to become an expert on any one of those domain areas (he only needs to know how to access an API).
The availability of previously arcane technology stacks, via simple API’s,are fueling the rising influence of developers in the enterprise.
Self-Service expedites and decentralizes evaluation
Today, enterprises complete on average 60% of the technology evaluation process before engaging a vendors sales team. Self-Service business models are pushing this number even higher. Through hyper transparency on pricing, documentation, commercial terms— and instant access to product — developers are able to thoroughly vet a vendor’s ability to meet their needs before engaging internal IT, or their external vendors sales team. Jeff Bezos said it best:
“When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say ‘that will never work!’ And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, Allowing customers and prospects to immediately access value.
The ability to understand and vet the full economic, technical, and commercial scope of a vendor’s solution, with no friction, is fueling the rising influence of developers in the enterprise
Pay- Per- Use eliminates capital expense risk
By transferring traditionally large cap-ex budgets to op-ex, with no contractual lock in required, developers are easily able to justify the cost of experimentation. When use cases move from pilot into production — the ability to map IT spend as a variable expense to the real time needs of a business has added benefits (lower average cost over the course of a business with natural ebbs and flows).
Reducing the business and financial risk of experimentation frees developers to explore new initiatives and ideas, easily.
As ‘Software eats the world’, developers will have a much larger influence on technology decisions made within businesses.
We are still in the early phases of this transition — but what’s clear is enterprise technology companies should be thinking through how this shift will impact their product, go to market, and sales strategies in the coming years.
