
Can You Build An Enterprise Only Web App? - terpua
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/09/can-you-build-a.html
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tptacek
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.

Third,

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dunsany
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.

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vaksel
Most enterprises don't seem that web friendly right now. It'll probably be
another decade before we see the change happening.

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tptacek
What do you mean, "not web friendly"?

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vaksel
that they don't trust someone else's hosted solution

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tptacek
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.

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vaksel
yeah and all of those are large corporations. You going to tell me that a big
corporation is going to trusted a hosted solution with a 5 man team?

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tptacek
Not for their payroll, but then, you wouldn't be dumb enough to try to start
that company. It took the ADP and SurePayroll people to be that dumb.

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jwilliams
Not sure if I'm missing the point of this... Doesn't the rise of SalesForce
completely contradict this?

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tptacek
Yes.

