Should Companies Build Their Own Enterprise Systems?

Jake Stauch says companies should not build their own main enterprise systems unless the needs are very bespoke and unique. Vibe-coding the main system-of-record tools is quite expensive to build and maintain, even when a company can do it. Buying off the shelf for work outside a core competency remains the build-versus-buy choice, because enterprise software is still hard to build.

Companies that tried it are relearning that enterprise software is complex and needs people to maintain it. Use cases and edge cases break, updates keep coming, and the company has to staff a team and pay for that labor. In many cases no one wants to work on the internal tools team. A lot of companies have hundreds and hundreds of SaaS applications when they probably need a couple dozen. Point-solution sprawl shrinks as the core systems of record and the core platforms absorb it, middleware goes away, and the market consolidates.

A SaaSpocalypse hits smaller, point-solution, smaller market-cap companies. The ERP, the HRIS, the ITSM, and the CRM stick around. They might transform. Serval is displacing tools in the same categories, and a new generation of incumbents appears while the categories stay.