The Enterprise Isn’t Sexy Again; It’s Been Sexy for Awhile

There has been much recent press about how the investment world pendulum has shifted toward the enterprise. While there is some truth to that assertion, the megashift toward enterprise actually started several years ago and will continue into the next decade. In 2010, during the height of consumer investing, we openly asked where all the enterprise seed investors were hiding, and we have been actively pursuing enterprise investments since our formation in 2006. In fact, over 50% of our investment dollars have gone into enterprise-oriented investments.

The last big shift in enterprise happened during the post-client-server era with the Internet, which redefined the data center at the time. Throughout the late 1980s to the late 1990s, category leaders in analytics, security, management and middleware—including names like VeriSign, Business Objects, Mercury, Tibco, Juniper and BEA Systems—were all created. At their height, these, along with other category leaders, represented several $100 billions in market cap.

The IT landscape today marks another, much bigger, shift, driven by massive growth in data and the explosion in mobile. The pace of technological change is presenting never-before-seen challenges that place unprecedented strain on IT infrastructure. We have never seen data center growth—from both a physical and virtual standpoint—like this before. The result has been the redefinition of every layer of the IT stack, from hardware to applications. The change is not only bigger than the last major shift in the 90s, but broader as well, with traditional markets like networking, storage and database being affected.

Here is an internal view of True’s own investments (this is not a comprehensive view of the entire landscape) in today’s infrastructure world and how they stack up to the old world.

True is fortunate to be partnered with the Founders of these new and innovative enterprise companies. They are a new breed who came out of building some of the most innovative, scale-out architectures in the world at companies like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, NASA, Splunk and VMware; who decided to invent new ways of doing the old and pioneered open source movements around technologies like Puppet and OpenStack; and who fundamentally believe that enterprise software should mask complexity, be easily consumable and be distributed far more efficiently.

It’s a new age in enterprise, and we are excited to be a part of it.