All the enterprise customers

This is a bit more of a musing than an actual observation. I hope and probably am wrong on this, but have you noticed how many of the data tools that we consume and purchase advertise with large enterprise customers? Another observation, I have seen the same enterprise turn up at "competing" vendors. The natural thought is, of course, the number of tools that have Microsoft as customers.

I not saying that these vendors are lying, I am certain someone at Microsoft used that tool at some point. What I am getting at is how large these contingents are. Without outing any vendor, I have found the company I worked for being put as a reference on a vendor site, without us knowing. and at a point where their tool was used by a handful of people, in a company of several thousand.

Now this is an extreme case, being placed as a reference without knowing. But it is the scale of use that is the matter. I would hardly dare to say that the software was in use with such a small fraction, I would have a hard time justifying saying that the enterprise is a customer, a team in the enterprise yes, but not the enterprise as a whole. Most people don't even know that the tool is in use.

Now I am not saying this as news. I expect anyone who has been around the block once or twice to see those logos and apply a hefty discount on any claims if not outright ignore them. I want to reflect on the message of the matter. There is a clear incentive for vendors to get large enterprises willing to put their names on the vendors’ websites as an endorsement. It grants them legitimacy and a sense of approval.

While we like to think that we discount them, seeing something familiar will make us slightly more positive towards it. The phenomenon related to the Ziganig effect.

So if vendors have an incentive to add familiar names to the roster, to the point of offering discounts on the product (personal experience). There is also an incentive for customers to accept that offer, possibly long before they know the fate of the system in the organisation. How can we then say that these customers are actual happy customers? And what is the value of a single team of 10 people in a 2,000-person enterprise using a tool, vs an entire company of 50 that is using the same tool?

Working these days as a platform engineer I can with confidence say that the largest challenge of building a platform and integrating tools is the point at which you want to spread it out across the company. Building a platform or tool stack for a single team in isolation is easy. It is when you need to start thinking of how this team interacts with others that the challenges start.

As such I rarely care for how happy a single team is with your tool (unless it is a tool that can live in isolation), but want to know how many customers, have been able to roll out the tool to multiple teams and make it a proper part of their workflow.

How many of these companies on the vendor websites, have taken your tool beyond the initial trial phase, or been able to expand it beyond 1-2 teams? For whom is it just a side project kicked off by some middle manager, and never left their unit?

Another related point is how many companies are using tooling that would be beneficial for customers but don’t know it. This is in many ways the inverse of the previous scenario. I was discussing with a colleague an upcoming data ingestion into our Snowflake data warehouse. Data had been procured from a large multi-national data provider and there was the question of how the data would be provided. We both agreed that our preferred solution would have been a Data Share between two Snowflake accounts, which wasn't possible.

A company of that size we rationalised should be using Snowflake as well. And you know what, I would not be surprised if some analytical corner of the organisation is using Snowflake. But for whatever reason not the part that delivers the data we needed. For all we know, they don't even know if there is a Snowflake account available, or the way their organisation is set up the Platform does not fit into their model.

In both cases, we have a tool, which has the potential to do a lot of good, but for one reason or another is not available or integrated in such a way with the enterprise that it is useful to us.

I might be cynical here. but we hear a lot about individual small success stories. And I can tell you that is the only thing I have heard more uniformly from vendors, than pricing discussion, and asking for success story use cases. anything to give them something to say they solved. Anyone can solve a single isolated use case. I want stories about how you scaled across the company, how you solve problems across teams, and how you are contributing to the bigger picture.

I know from a developer point of view it is important to have use cases to build the product around, heck, I do so myself, but we also need to keep in mind the big picture and solve for that. It doesn't matter how good you are at solving individual problems if it is a nightmare to fit into the bigger picture.

So how many of the priced customers these vendors present are full enterprise customers (where the enterprise/organization uses the tool systematically), and how many are only isolated enclaves within organisations? How many have solved the big picture question of making a tool part of the organisation, versus how many use it just for one thing?