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Tech visionary: enterprise IT is the place to be

Marc Andreessen, who helped kick off the Web revolution in the 1990s, is putting his money into undisclosed emerging enterprise IT vendors.
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer

There are reports that Marc Andreessen, tech entrepreneur of entrepreneurs, is getting bullish on, of all things, enterprise software. Interesting news, considering recent concerns that have been surfacing that enterprise IT startups are a dying breed.

Sarah Lacy, writing in TechCrunch, says that Andreessen has been pouring some of his money into some undisclosed enterprise software companies.

Andreessen, founder of Netscape, was one of the tech pioneers who kicked off the Web revolution in the 1990s.

As Andreessen put it in a recent panel:

"We are very, very interested and active right now in the enterprise software and a very large number of professional investors think enterprise is dead and, you know, we just think that is absolutely not the case."

What kinds of software companies is Andreessen investing in?  Lacy asked him if he meant cloud companies, niche products, or core software. "His answer was ‘all of the above’, she reports.

Lacy expresses similar concerns about the consolidation that swept the enterprise IT industry, noting that Andreessen says it's time for an industry "reset." As she observes, "Oracle’s – and to a far lesser degree SAP’s – shopping sprees of the past few years have cleaned out most of the late 1990s enterprise software brush and most big businesses rely on one or both of the big vendors, with no best-of-breed competitors mixed in an very little in the way of new products and real innovation."

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