– Tom Kaneshige, CIO
January 13, 2012
Uh-oh, CIO. You’re not going to like this.
A crowd of mostly mobile upstarts came to the AppNation Enterprise Summit held this week at the lavish Bentley Reserve in San Francisco to learn how to sell to the enterprise. The theme of the mobile apps event was one of revolution, with roundtables and interviews entitled “Re-inventing IT,” “How to Succeed in the Enterprise Without Really Trying,” and the oddly named “The Arab Spring of IT.”
The main message: Selling to the enterprise no longer starts with the CIO.
Mobile upstarts listened to Matt Tucker, CTO and co-founder of Jive Software, advising them to do what amounts to an end-run around the CIO and court the line-of-business executives instead. Selling software and services to the enterprise, says Tucker, is about “tipping the balance of power.”
In fact, that’s how Jive Software, which provides enterprise social software, landed the business of the Redlands Police Department in southern California.
