

Siasto Attempts the Improbable: Making Enterprise Software Beautiful (YC W11) - niccolop
http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/05/siasto-attempts-the-improbable-making-enterprise-software-beautiful/

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se85
There is nothing enterprise about this at all, its just yet another project
management portal with a pretty design and a simplistic feature set (the
complete opposite of what an enterprise needs).

...And to confirm my thoughts, the linked post basically says in the first
paragraph that design is the reason for many problems behind enterprise
software....

I think a lot of potential enterprise customers who have to deal with the
problems associated with poor enterprise solutions daily would never give you
guys a second look after saying something so....unrealistic?

The reality is that most enterprise software I've ever had to work with has
had far bigger issues than UX and design, and due to office politics among
many other roadblocks, software with these known issues can remain running for
years with no fixes, or half assed fixes at best, before a decision is finally
made to deal with the situation, and at this point, the cycle repeats itself
again.

Do you honestly think that corporations are going to break the cycle and do
something different and drastic (such as changing all their workflows to suit
your tool for example) just because your stuff looks prettier and easier to
use?

When large companies are looking to replace architecture, there is usually a
pretty big reason behind it, and many people who need to be sold on the idea
for final approval, this isn't going to happen because of anything design
related, it will almost certainly be feature or strategy related.

You will find very limited traction going down this path. Enterprise is all
about features, workflows, politics and (sometimes but rarely) reducing costs
(from a product and man-hours point of view), all I see is a simple project
management tool that doesn't address any of this.

The idea of a cloud distributed project management portal arguably makes it
non-enterprise automatically (security or privacy policies anyone?) as does
the fact that you guys are clearly not an enterprise yourself (although there
is little you can do about this, it just puts you at an automatic disadvantage
for consideration amongst many large corporations).

How will you guys support a support contract for an enterprise with 1000
users? What about 5000? Hows about 20,000?

My point behind all of this is that, to break the software lifecycle in large
corporations in large numbers requires large amounts of money, and many multi-
faceted strategies (which require considerable head counts), amongst many
other complex considerations.

I suggest you guys have a long and hard think about who your customer really
is in enterprise (its not the end user, its middle management) and think about
pivoting into something which would ultimately not be as disruptive to an
enterprise as a new project management portal (for the 10th time in as many
years, as is usually the case) or ditch enterprise altogether, it sounds like
you guys have a lot to learn before you can build a product for the
enterprise, and there is nothing fun about doing this, trust me!

I do really like what you guys have done so far from a product point of view,
the problem is that it totally is not appropriate for enterprise and is a very
very long way from being even close, I think you guys should be doing
something more like what Yammer are doing with their general business strategy
(not targetting enterprises, just businesses, big and small, but mostly small)
to have any chance at success, and because of the industry you have chosen
(project management) with the added bonus of Yammer as a competitor its going
to be tough to gain any traction regardless of business strategy, but you guys
should be looking to at least maximise your chances instead of shooting
yourselves in the foot. Pivot.

\- An ex-enterprise programmer.

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dave_sullivan
As someone who currently makes a product geared towards improving the user
experience of enterprise software, I think much of what you say is true. Some
things I've learned from my own experience:

Rather than try to get people to _change_ anything (like have them use a
different product altogether) I built my product to integrate deeply with
Salesforce.com (a product with a large install base). I tried to focus on
specific shortcomings of Salesforce and fix those because a huge investment
has already been sunk in their current system and the whole thing is not going
to change.

Rather than focus first on design (which certainly factors in--it's a new user
interface for Salesforce) I focused on improving the speed of specific tasks
and emphasize time savings and increased user adoption.

It is a lot easier to get something sold and closed at a company with 50-100
users than it is 500-1000.

I have gotten feedback that I should have made things even _more_ like Excel
or ACT (ugh), because it's what people are used to. IE, many people don't want
a _new_ interface, they want an _old_ one.

It has been near impossible to sell a "one size fits all" solution for this,
so I have gone the route of customizing heavily in exchange for much higher
prices--a hybrid product/consulting approach. Simple sounds like a good idea,
but every company has different processes and methods, and they want those
integrated. (Probably why Salesforce itself had to focus on customization and
a developer eco-system so much over the last 5 years).

Even with all this, what I thought would be a "slam dunk" has proven to be
really really hard to sell. However, I have massively improved my sales
conversions by ditching the self serve approach and embracing the hybrid
product/consulting model.

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se85
Completely agree with you!

Its a frustrating market for sure, but there is lots of money to be made, with
the right strategies, and very little money with the wrong strategies.

I was doing a similar thing to you for a year or so, by piggybacking off
Atlassian JIRA, as opposed to building my own products. This definitely made
selling the solution much, much, much, easier!

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maukdaddy
I'd hardly call that enterprise software.

When you can make any of the following somewhat more painless, and marginally
prettier, you'll make $$$:

\- SAP

\- PeopleSoft

\- Pretty much any ERP or financial application

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arethuza
Actually, to be fair to Microsoft, Dynamics AX 2012 is actually fairly
reasonable looking.

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mickeyp
And fairly easy to extend with C# to boot.

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cwilson
While I'd definitely not call this enterprise, I am impressed by how elegantly
all of the features they do have are implemented. Yes, it's a simple product,
but I actually quite like that (so many project management systems are bloated
with excess features for edge cases). I'm particularly pleased with how easy
it was to grab everything from Google Calendar and Google Docs.

Most of all I was blown away by the new user experience. I'm making all of my
co-founders go through it simply so they see what a great new user experience
is like, and understand why I obsess over such things (as well as to see if
they might like using this over say, Asana).

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Seth_Kriticos
I really wish someone would start to make enterprise software well documented.
Most of the stuff I have to deal with has a truckload of marketing bullcrap
and very little sane technical documentation with a total lack of community.
Also most of the stuff is very unflexible, outdated and slower than a snail. I
can go on all day, there is no end to the weirdness of "enterprise" software.
It's really bad.

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edw519
Sorry to burst your bubble, but costmetic issues in the enterprise are exactly
that: cosmetic. You may think people care about them, but believe me, they
don't.

Enterprise people need solutions to their problems and answers to their
questions, no matter how pretty.

Just one (out of thousands) of everyday examples:

I already know from existing reporting that 984 orders (18% of our backlog)
are already past due. For those 984 orders:

    
    
      - How many are for one item and how many are for multiples?
      - Do we own what we owe those customers?
      - If we do own it, is it in the proper warehouse?
      - If it is in the proper warehouse, can we find it?
      - If we can find it, is it undamaged and certified?
      - If it's shippable, do we have enough labor to ship it?
      - If it isn't certified, how soon can QA certify it?
      - If it isn't in the right warehouse, can we move it?
      - If we don't own any, where can we get some?
      - Which vendors have it on the shelf?
      - Which vendors do we have blanket purchase orders with?
      - Which vendors do we have contracts with?
      - Which orders can be split to satisfy a partial?
      - Which orders are for customers already on credit hold?
      - Which customers are threatening not to renew with us?
    

and (ironically) the most asked question of all:

    
    
      - Which orders must be shipped to hit our quarterly numbers?
    

Carve the answers to those questions into a pile of shit, and enterprise
customers will dump the contents of their wallets into your bank account.

Give them something pretty that doesn't answer those questions and you're just
wasting your time.

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tarr11
Is this a more well designed replacement for Yammer? Hard to tell what the use
case is from the article.

~~~
niccolop
It's more like a better designed basecamp, a place to manage projects. Email
us at contact@siasto.com if you have questions.

