Posted by throwawaypm123 14 hours ago
Tell HN: I'm a PM at a big system of record SaaS. We're cooked
BigCo SoRs, differences aside, have historically been a good, low-drama way to make a living in tech. RSUs, ~40-hour weeks, generally smart colleagues, and real problems to solve for F100 customers. Our products work, but are not loved. Enterprise sales runs the show.
I have no concerns about a scrappy AI startup or indie dev replacing us. The real threat is other SoR vendors, the cloud providers, and of course the AI labs themselves. All of them are coming for our SaaS margins, and as an industry we are woefully unprepared.
Every major SoR has its core competency (HR, ERP, CRM, etc.), but also a long tail of lesser-known portfolio products that increasingly overlap with other SoRs and serve as growth vectors. The competition here is only going to accelerate. As a huge enterprise, you’re not going to rip out a component your SoR for a cool startup or a vibe-coded internal tool... but you would seriously consider doing so if the alternative comes from another SoR vendor you use and is cheaper.
The public cloud providers are explicitly positioning themselves as the place where your business data, AI agents/LLMs, and critical applications live. This is on a direct collision course with SoRs’ own AI platform ambitions that they are banking on for growth.
The AI labs themselves have the same ambition. Note where systems of record sit in OpenAI’s Frontier press release marketecture: a dotted, nearly invisible line at the bottom [2].
SoRs aren’t dead, and they’re not being disrupted by vibe coders. But the path forward is brutal.
Which brings me to the hardest point that applies to me as well. SoR teams are not known for fast execution, cutting edge AI adoption, product taste, or engineering excellence. These are exactly the strengths of our new competitors. We also struggle to attract this kind of talent. People who fit that profile go to FAANG or the labs. We could try to compete with RSUs, but those are down ~50% over the past few months, and the industry is under increasing pressure from investors around stock-based comp and M&A in general.
The goal here is an honest take from someone on the inside. There’s a difficult road ahead. I think SoRs will always continue to exist in some form but I don’t think the recent market corrections are overblown.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441 [2] https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-frontier/
What you’re worrying about is just bigger middlemen.
If you were not a value extracting middleman there would be no fear of replacement, because you can always create more than what you take.
I’m glad if this causes a shift in the industry and we lose x analysts, x architects, x scientists, data engineers and all other formulaic middlemen that just live in a weird middlemen economy.
It is immense luck that we don’t have to actually produce something and we get paid but it is much better if we’re forced to actually do something that isn’t empty.
So what are we going to do about it? Genuinely up for a startup here.
Used to take a few days, 90% was never that hard, now it takes half a day or so.
If you are a huge enterprise, why not?
Data egress and ingress are always possible, but then you have to manage authX (etc) in more than one place, more than two places, oops now it's 3, 4, 5 and now we got ransomware'd
I'm at a medium enterprise and this is true. If I go with e.g. Atlassian I can get everything checked off, even if it's expensive and kinda dogshit. But I know they have a support system, I know they read CVEs and issue patch notes, I know I can find the info for audits and SOC2 cert and everything else.
Oh, some startup offers better software for a tenth the cost? Great. It'll be 30% more work for me to track down all that bullshit? Ok then, complete non-starter, I'll stick with Atlassian.
There’s so much process that gets put around the tools. Headcount that’s justified. Etc.
TLDR excerpt: - Top layer — the AI agent. The thing that actually executes the work. - Middle layer — the SaaS UI. The dashboards, the workflows, the buttons you click. - Bottom layer — systems of record. The databases, CRMs, and ERPs that store the real data.
Right now, value is getting sucked upward into the agent layer and downward into the data layer. Everything in the thin middle gets crushed.
AI slop.