Index’s Volpi Sees New Wave of Conflicts in Enterprise Software

Brace yourselves for more conflict among the software arms merchants in the enterprise.

That’s one of the predictions of Mike Volpi, a longtime venture capitalist and tech executive who has become an active investor in the category. In an interview with The Information, Volpi said he anticipated more collisions between companies in once-discrete parts of the enterprise software business, as they hunt for more growth. One example, according to Volpi: Stalwarts in a category called workflow software, including Salesforce, Atlassian and ServiceNow, are likely to increasingly invade the turf of data-focused businesses, like Datadog, Snowflake and Elastic, for customers—and vice versa.

The conflicts won’t end there, said Volpi, a partner at Index Ventures, who believes those data firms will increasingly creep into the cybersecurity category now occupied by CrowdStrike and others. Volpi is especially bullish on the opportunities in data, which the breakout success of Snowflake and Databricks has underscored. Both companies handle the processing of data that companies generate, using a type of database known as a data warehouse designed to perform this task quickly.