I've been watching a trend in software that's really significant. The potential size of the market is as large as the discontent that business units have with their internal IT departments. I'm talking about cloud services that target the business units themselves, not their saurian Enterprise IT department.

Take Salesforce. Their logo emphasizes the "No Software" concept because the single most important part of their model is that you don't need Enterprise IT.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Salesforce helped establish cloud delivery of software years ago. As cloud services become more capable, the same technique is being applied to more categories of business software. And the model itself is improving. The key is that you should be able to deploy the solution without asking IT for permission.

You couldn't do this years ago because you needed to deploy software on PCs in the enterprise, which meant you needed IT. The web and HTTPS solved that problem. The most recent limiting factor was needing IT for data integration. But modern cloud services have agents that can run on someone's laptop and use HTTPS to send data from excel files or a connection to an internal database. Sure, it circumvents IT controls and audit requirements, but it also circumvents long, expensive IT projects. And it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.

The Vendors Know

The vendors of this style of software know they are enabling business units directly. They don't advertise to IT departments. Their sales pitch is aimed directly at non-technical users of the service: easy installation, user-administered, and never using the words "Enterprise IT". Instead of responding to RFPs and attending bake-offs to check off features, vendors have self-service web ordering systems and take business Vice Presidents to lunch and ask why they're letting IT kick them in the balls.

Pricing is also changing to be more business friendly. Enterprise IT departments will generally have a heavyweight procurement process that takes months to sign a contract, involving complex licensing with CPU-equivalents, 22% per year annual maintenance, yadda yadda. But with these new services, it's $x/month for a seat, period. It's a pricing model regular business users can calculate, project, and most importantly, pay out of their own budget.

This model will be more successful the more Enterprise IT sucks. And it will continue to suck for a number of years, lumbering along towards its own extinction. There's a new future of enterprise IT — with smaller, better adapted mammals instead of dinosaurs. But that's a topic for another day.