In a world of software overabundance, Siftery offers clarity

Auren Hoffman
Siftery Blog
Published in
3 min readJan 20, 2016

--

Companies are awash in software. If your company existed 10 years ago, it likely has ten times the number of software vendors now than it did then. If you work at a start-up, you likely leverage software so much that your company is 4 times as productive with the same number of people as it was just ten years ago.

In this landscape of massive software fragmentation and abundance of vendors, comes the very hard paradox of choice. It is becoming increasingly hard to figure out what are the best tools to use for your company. As it is getting harder to choose (because there are more software vendors), it is getting even more important to make the right choice (because the software is getting more and more powerful). People who choose the right tools will propel their company forward … and those people will be rewarded in productivity gains. But there will also be people who choose the wrong tools for their company … and those companies will be eaten by the competition.

Enter Siftery. Siftery launched today on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/tech/siftery).

Software recommendations based on the tools you use

Siftery helps you discover the right software product for your business. Great software is a force multiplier for your job. And picking the right solution for your company will make you look like a rockstar.

The idea is to take every expert who understands enterprise software, put them together, and use the collective knowledge to make deep recommendations. It is like IBM Watson replacing a Gartner analyst.

and see what products other companies are using

The core thesis of Siftery is the software you should use is informed by the software you do use. There isn’t one best marketing automation software. There are actually about 40 really good marketing automation software products and the one that is best for you might not be the one that is best for me. That software selection should be informed by the software your company is already using … because tools are best when they work together.

Siftery now has software product stacks on over 130,000 companies. Once you tell Siftery what your company uses, it gives you product recommendations through its gigantic collaborative filter based on the combination of products the other 129,999 companies use.

I had been thinking about the future of enterprise software for a while. About a year ago I met Siftery’s two founders (I became an early investor), Vamshi Mokshagundam (CEO) and Ayan Barua (CTO). Vamshi’s first job out of college was at the Corporate Executive Board and then he worked at Ovum (which is the European version of Gartner). Vamshi became a master at helping companies buy the right software products. He did this by visiting the companies, interviewing people there to find out what products they use, and then doing a ton of research to figure out what products they should be using. Vamshi was great at his job and he helped a lot of companies … but his services were really expensive and took a long time. Vamshi thought there must be a better, more scalable way. Enter Siftery.

--

--