Why Enterprise Software?

The banner image in today's post popped up in my' memories' feed a couple of days ago. It was taken nine years ago at the Microsoft Management Summit a few minutes before fifteen-hundred attendees were let into the room to hear about Unified Device Management (aka Intune) for the first time. I have built my career on enterprise software & cloud services, and it is my passion. But for new engineering grads, it is not usually the obvious choice.?

After twenty years in the industry, I still can't explain what I do to my family. The best I have come up with is to tell them I spent 18 years at Microsoft building "that annoying thing that pops up and says you have to patch your computer." At Google, I build tools that help customers shut down old inefficient data centers. Even with that pithy explanation, I usually see their eyes glaze over – and if I try to go into more detail, they begin to nod off or suddenly remember that they have something more important to be doing. I often envy the reaction engineers at YouTube or Xbox must get when they tell their kids' classmates what they do. But, while I don't get invited to speak to my son's class for career day, I still love building services for enterprise customers. And if I had to sum up why, I would simply say the customers and the impact.??

Let's start with the customers. In the consumer software world, the user is not the only customer. In the era of 'free' online services, users are often the product1. Advertisements fund the services we use daily – and our eyeballs are sold to the highest bidder. Even Apple is in this business - with some analysts predicting that Apple ad revenue will top $6 billion annually by 2025 (ref ). The economic model for enterprise software and services is much simpler: the customers are the users – and they choose to use and pay for a service because it directly benefits them. It's simple, and I like it.

But there is more. When your customer relies on your software for their job (e.g., an IT administrator depending on System Center or a migration consultant using the Google Cloud Platform ), a deeper connection develops. At conferences, I have had customers come up and hug me and tell me stories of how they have built a career using my software. I have also had customers come up and yell at me for getting something wrong. When someone depends on your product to feed their family – they don't hold back. The partnership that develops between customers and engineers is truly awesome.

So, what about impact? Well, when your software is installed on every PC or powers a third of the Internet, it turns out even small changes have significant consequences.??

A typical enterprise computer uses over 150 watts per hour and, if left on 24h a day (as they often were), would emit over 525 kg of CO2e in a year (ref ). Multiply this by the hundreds of thousands of enterprise computers out there, and you have a pretty big number. "Boring" enterprise software helped put a pretty big dent in this number. In 2013, Microsoft shipped Systems Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2 – which included a new power management feature I helped develop with a team of 3 engineers. The feature gave IT Administrators the ability to automatically put machines to sleep when they were not being used (and automatically wake them up before they were expected to start using them again). When deployed, it had the potential to help customers reduce power usage by over 66%. Meaning the feature we developed helps remove over 50,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year. That is the power of big numbers and an excellent example of the reach you can have with Enterprise software.??

I now work at Google, building tools that help enterprises move their workloads to the cloud. The average server in an on-prem data center emits 916 kg of CO2e per year (ref ). Google's economy of scale and investment in green energy means we can run the same workloads in our cloud much more efficiently. Your next tweet , flight , purchase , or visit the doctor will have less impact on the environment because of our work.??

Nothing beats the feeling of sitting backstage and looking out over an audience of professionals that have built their careers on a product you have created. And very few engineer's jobs have a planet-scale impact. Enterprise software is pretty cool!

Be Happy!

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Footnotes:

1. Yes, I realize there is some irony in a Google employee pointing this out. I take solace in the fact that the first of Google's three values we start learning on day one is "respect the user." And it is drilled into every employee on day one that if you ever have to choose between something that is right for a user or customer – you choose the user every time.

Please note that the opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company.