With $1 Trillion at Stake, Enterprise Technology Gets Its Star Turn

WIRED

...But here’s why you should care about the latest enterprise software or services outfit knocking on your company’s door. Every 10 to 15 years the enterprise market goes through an upheaval where the next generation of technology replaces the old. We’re in the early stages of one of those big displacements right now, where huge companies are brought to their knees, and new giants are born.

The technology trends driving it are things we read about daily, the cloud and big data. But the reason it happens with such ferocity in the corporate world, is that unlike the consumer world, the enterprise market is a zero-sum game. There is only so much budget to go around. That means for every sale that some new hotshot company makes, some other company loses a sale.

The last time it happened was from 1990 to 2000, when companies like PeopleSoft, Business Objects, SAP, Oracle, Sybase even Microsoft grabbed share and saw their sales and market value balloon. Today it’s happening again with companies like Appirio, Box, GoodData, Jive, Netsuite, Palo Alto Networks, Okta, Service Now, Splunk and others gunning for companies like EMC, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and IBM...

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