🏢 Enterprise SaaS Can’t Be Terrible Forever

Enterprise software has been an attractive market for a long time, but the shift to intuitive, delightful products will lead to dramatic changes over the next 10 years

After sinking a lot of time and money into a new tool nobody at your company uses, you realize that (once again) you’ve fallen into another trap. Not only are you on the hook for a one year contract, but because this software is so clunky and challenging to use, you’ve hired a full time employee to administrate the beast. Welcome to enterprise software…

The modern company today uses 254 software tools on average, leading growth of the proverbial enterprise software pie towards a cumulative ~$150 Billion. A company may use Workday for payroll and benefits, Lattice for employee enablement/feedback, Glassdoor for recruiting, Salesforce for core CRM, Notion, Coda and Evernote all at the same time, Jira and Shortcut…the list can get long very quickly.

There is an opportunity here. Today's enterprise software companies are on defense. They're making it hard to buy and harder to leave. Nimble startups are biting at their heels, and purpose-built solutions have proven more effective than one-size fits most. Startups can win if they make something easy-to-use or, dare I say, delightful? It isn’t the specialty platform that matters, but the overall quality of the niche tool. While it may be a slow shift, there is an opportunity to make switching easy, onboarding painless and overall UX clean and simple. The functionality of the product doesn’t even have to be much different, so long as it is easier-to-use than the status quo. Enterprise software is going to start looking and feeling like consumer software.

When it comes to the enterprise software market in the 2020s. Look for massive companies to keep acquiring smaller, easier to use challengers that solve a specific problem and solve it well. For example, Workday acquired Scout and turned it into Workday Strategic Sourcing. Oracle acquires anything related to ERP and ductapes it to NetSuite…Watch the average number of software tools per company continue to climb. This will lead to a huge opportunity for consolidation platforms and the ultimate uprooting of the incumbent Workday, Salesforce, etc.

We invested in Numeric.io because it takes advantage of this exact opportunity. FP&A teams get excited to use Numeric. “Numeric enables teams to close faster and improve collaboration, visibility and control.” Onboarding is quick and painless and the sales cycle doesn’t take months. The competitors like Floqast train you to use their product with a team of CPAs but it doesn’t need to be that hard. Numeric will win by delivering a low friction experience.

Enterprise software has been an attractive market for a long time, but the shift to intuitive, delightful products will see dramatic changes over the next 10 years. Due to further fragmentation, there will emerge more, albeit smaller winners.  Enterprise software can’t remain terrible forever.