Why Won't Large Companies Rip Out Salesforce and SAP?

Alex Lieberman says ripping a system out and rebuilding it gets harder as a company moves up market, and he does not agree that Salesforce or SAP is really at risk. Those products stay because so much money is at stake. Getting the replacement wrong can mean hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, so the company stays risk averse.

For a mid-tier tool that costs a few million dollars a year, the question is whether that spend will ever move the needle enough to put engineers on a rebuild. Tenex built its own CRM and its own operating system, then ran into the other half of what software is worth: the maintenance and improvement you do not have to think about when the tool is not the core business. The prize has to justify that load. Shawn Wang is testing a smaller case, a mid-tier tool of about $40,000 a year rebuilt for about $1,000, including a better experience and changes in minutes rather than months. Startups and fast-growing mid-sized companies can move that way. An enterprise already dug into a capability rarely sets out to build a much better version of the SaaS it uses and spin that version out.