Even angels are going enterprise
By Francis Moran
There’s been a growing amount of attention paid recently to the surge in interest by startups in working on enterprise-grade products and services rather than the quick-to-market consumer and web applications that for so long seemed to dominate pitch contests, accelerator program cohorts and media attention.
“Enterprise is getting sexy,” Kevin Rose of Google Ventures said recently. Bernard Lunn has done a 180 on his 10-year-old requiem for enterprise software, saying it didn’t die, it just went into a coma from which it is now recovering. Enterprises, Lunn said, “cannot simply empower every employee with consumer web type tools and hope they all pull together to grow the profits.” Our own Jesse Rodgers wrote earlier this week about the allure of building enterprise products, saying that opportunities in the enterprise are being driven by the BYOD movement that is requiring IT departments to deliver better tools, a higher expectation of a better user experience than that delivered by stodgy old enterprise software, and an easing of the once-onerous burden associated with the enterprise sale.
