“The enterprise is sexy.”
That’s a debatable point, though the description has cropped up a lot recently. But what we are definitely seeing is an increasingly sour taste among investors for consumer-focused companies like Zynga, Groupon, Color, and others, and a shift back toward the enterprise world as a more lucrative arena for investment dollars and business development.
This investor interest tends to run in cycles, the last of which for enterprise data came to an end with the demise of the 2000 dot-com era. We’ve been thinking it for awhile now: agile enterprise software companies are obviously well-equipped to adjust to market trends and aren’t locked into the old platforms that developers were tied to in the ’90s.
A February 2013 article in SD Times spoke to the flexibility that is now an asset. “Developers in the enterprise now have one thing they’ve never really had: choice. While vendor lock-in was all the rage for development tools in the 1990s, today’s tools tend to be open source and interoperable, allowing developers to use what they want, when they want.”
The old productivity challenges have faded into the background. There’s been a boom in enterprise innovation, and it coincides with cloud services for an overall streamlined and simplified infrastructure for those enterprise companies most able to adjust. The buzzword is agile, and we need it in developers as well as the companies they work for.
What investors see here is more stability than they’ve found in many consumer-driven companies founded on all the social hype. Certainly enterprise software companies and investors alike have Big Data near in mind when we think about the future of the industry. Big Data is booming.
Says Herb Cunitz, president of Big Data company Hortonworks, part of what is driving increased interest is, “the availability of data that didn’t exist two to three years ago, and what innovators are doing to leverage that info and make smarter and faster decisions.”
Enterprise innovators have been more visible this year at SXSW too, that heavily consumer-oriented tech extravaganza. The conversation has revolved mostly around how the people and companies that compose the enterprise community “are building the new way we live and work.” As the social emphasis winds down, in its wake, more of the masses are now thinking about how people get their work done, and how they can view their data in increasingly accessible ways. That includes a shift to cloud-based systems, increased mobile access, and giving people a more comprehensive understanding of the data they use and see.
Now that’s the sexier side of enterprise, in our book.
