Enterprise software has been trending towards better buyer-seller-alignment for a long time. Switching costs keep falling (SaaS was already easier to rip out than on-prem, and AI makes them even lower), and customers finally hold more of the cards.
I'm seeing it from the vendor side too. We're doing more of the work for the customer, pushing for weekly touchpoints instead of quarterly QBRs, and for the first time we're even "bespoke-curious" about building on top of our APIs. The old "sorry, that isn't possible" / "we'll look at getting that into the roadmap" playbook just doesn't cut it anymore.
Put simply: it's a wonderful time to be a buyer of enterprise software, as counterintuitive as that sounds (fears of slop etc).
Enterprise software has been trending towards better buyer-seller-alignment for a long time. Switching costs keep falling (SaaS was already easier to rip out than on-prem, and AI makes them even lower), and customers finally hold more of the cards.
I'm seeing it from the vendor side too. We're doing more of the work for the customer, pushing for weekly touchpoints instead of quarterly QBRs, and for the first time we're even "bespoke-curious" about building on top of our APIs. The old "sorry, that isn't possible" / "we'll look at getting that into the roadmap" playbook just doesn't cut it anymore.
Put simply: it's a wonderful time to be a buyer of enterprise software, as counterintuitive as that sounds (fears of slop etc).