Ben Horowitz is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of Opsware.

Every day I hear from entrepreneurs, angel investors and venture capitalists about an exciting new movement called “the consumerization of the enterprise.” They tell me how the old expensive Rolex wearing sales forces are a thing of the past and, in the future, companies will “consume” enterprise products proactively like consumers pick up Twitter.

But when I talk to the most successful new enterprise companies like WorkDay, Apptio, Jive, Zuora, and Cloudera, they all employ serious and large enterprise sales efforts that usually include expensive people some of who indeed wear Rolex watches. In fact, companies like Yammer who originally started with new age models have transitioned to more traditional enterprise sales approaches after experiencing the market without them.

So what gives? Are all these smart people out of their minds? Has nothing changed since the early days of IBM? Some things have changed, but others are exactly as they were.



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