Peter makes some really good points in his post about the coming wave of enterprise 2.0. On the Dow Jones conference panel I did last week with Peter some of these issues came out and there was some spirited discussion, my view is that at the end of the day there are 3 things that modern enterprises do better as a result of software:
1) Automate processes and as a result achieve higher productivity by through-putting higher transaction volume with the fewer resources.
2) Manage master data, which could be as simple as basic customer information or as complex as bill of materials which include a high degree of rules processing (e.g. supplier lead time).
3) Collaboration mostly in the form of exception handling, otherwise known as workflow.
The thing that makes enterprise web 2.0 so appealing to investors that understand enterprise software is that the promise here is the one thing that has locked out startups from big enterprise deals… integration with number 1 and 2 above as a result of number 3. The SOA underpinnings that every major enterprise vendor is building enables this by removing the high tax customers pay for process integration, similar to how XML dumbed down data integration to text and removed a big barrier for application integration at the data layer.
EarlyStageVC: The Coming Wave of Enterprise Web 2.0:
This is why I think Enterprise Web 2.0 is different from Consumer Web 2.0. Enterprise’s have goals and structure. People around the Enterprise collaborate, but the collaboration is (supposed to be) undemocratic, i.e., ordered and non-chaotic. Ironically, this is not a new category. We used to call it Workflow and it was on the Known Quicksand Sector list at every VC firm, along with Middleware, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Search. It was a Known Quicksand because no two implementations looked the same. Users couldn’t change the workflow to suit their needs. Users couldn’t automate the dozens of little tasks of collaboration that they do every week.
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