Forrester recently conducted a survey that addresses issues important for Web 2.0 startups and Enterprise 2.0. The survey was reported by Captain Obvious and ZDNet’s Web Technology. Forrester asked 100 CIOs (Chief Information Officers) employed by companies with at least 500 IT staff if they would turn to start ups for Web 2.0 technology. Most said no. I assume that most of these people are risk adverse and do not want to bet on small companies for critical IT needs. They would rather look to what the big and mid-size software firms with track records are providing so their vendors will likely be around for a while. This should be no surprise to anyone in the enterprise software business.

When I was responsible for a portion of the KM practice at a large consulting firm, I had many small companies approach me about a possible alliance. While we did software alliances, I knew that most of our partners would not be very interested in taking these firms to their clients. The alliance structure was biased in favor of large to mid-sized vendors that would generate a lot of revenue for the firm. Risk was also not a valued option. They want to see a strong user base and not be the lead adopters. This position made sense given the context and, to be helpful, I did not offer much encouragement to these small firms no matter how great their products seemed. I did not want them to waste their limited resources on something that had little chance of success.

So what is a small company to do if they do not have selling to a large firm as an exit strategy? Or even if they have this goal, how do they develop an initial enterprise user base to attract this investment? Well, they had better find alliances with these large firms. But even here how do they get the initial user base to attract alliance partners?

There is another option, at least to get started and develop a user base, even within the enterprise. The study found one exception. Captain Obvious wrote, “If companies are maintaining strictly direct relations with the end user, and business-to-business arrangements aren’t made or kept to side-dish status, none of the above (negative responses) applies.”

Many Web 2.0 firms are selling to individual users. And many of these products are coming into the enterprise through happy individual users. So perhaps the enterprise sales strategy, at least in the short term, is to focus on developing a satisfied base of individual users who will take your products into the enterprise. This is currently how a lot of Web 2.0 stuff is getting inside the enterprise. Look to getting key web influencers on your side. Reach out to the individual user market. Do not invest your limited resources in high price enterprise software sales people. At least, I have rarely seen this work.