<p>There have been plenty of blog posts on why enterprise startups are "hot," but enterprise startups can range from cloud infrastructure companies to developer software to new enterprise applications. Evaluating each market is very different because each of these markets are built upon each other (e.g., a next-generation CRM app is built using new database technology for analytics, which is in turn hosted on software-defined data center technology).</p><p>As a partner at Greylock, I've evaluated startups at every level of this enterprise software "stack," and I've developed some frameworks for organizing how I think through the different opportunities. Two key ones for enterprise IT that I want to share are the infrastructure triangle and the enterprise applications triangle. I use the triangle to organize thoughts on how each technology is currently being disrupted.The infrastructure triangle</p><p>Every computer, data center and even smartphone breaks down into the three main infrastructure components: compute, storage and networking. Overlaying all three corners corners is management and security. Each corner is facing disruption, and the axis between each area is where a lot of the action is. For example, the axes between storage and CPU, and between networking and CPU, is where I place software-defined storage and networking companies, because increases in compute power enable commodity servers to replace legacy storage systems from EMC and Cisco.</p><p>But let's focus on each corner individually, starting with CPU. In one way or another, the IT revolution over the past 20 years has been driven by Moore's Law, the constant improvement in CPU power and efficiency. Typically, cloud platforms and applications use virtualization to carve up a server into multiple virtual machines because applications have historically been written with the server or VM as the unit of compute. However, we are seeing the start of a revolution of how applications are built to take advantage of the improvements in CPU power.</p><p><a href="http://gigaom.com/2013/11/23/the-it-triangle-strategy-for-evaluating-enterprise-tech-startups/">Keep reading...</a></p>