Consumerization of Enterprise

I was surprised the first time I read that roughly 98% of employers in the US have fewer than one hundred employees.  It's easy to view the employer landscape in the US as one dominated by large multinational corporations because those are the companies we hear about on the news every day.  Reality is in fact  quite different as most members of America's workforce are employed by SMBs.  From a technology perspective, these companies have traditionally  been underserved but represent a massive opportunity for enterprise companies that understand how to bring technology downmarket.  Most of these companies still rely heavily on paper and manual process to keep their businesses running, and are aggressively looking to partner with vendors who can either eliminate some of their pain points or  at minimum modernize the way their business operates.

I expect to see more of the products and services that have previously only been made available to large cap, Fortune 500 companies do just that in the coming years.  In order to scale down the software is going to have to move towards a more self-service and standardized model.  Small and midsize companies don't have time or resources to pay for custom built heavily serviced software solutions, nor should they have to.