As someone who works (not in IT) at a government-owned BigCo (2000 employees), let me tell you: building the software that will solve our problems will be the easy part. Navigating the bureaucracy of BigCo's procurement processes will probably take you more time, skill and money than actually building the product.
And it's not enough to have a product that solves a problem. BigCo never fixes things all at once. So whatever your product is, it'll have to work with innumerable poorly-documented legacy systems. Integrating with BigCo's existing, proprietary systems might take longer than developing the core of your actual product.
But the upshot is that BigCos are used to dealing with BigSoftwareCo that is just as slow and unresponsive in its development processes as BigCo itself. BigSoftwareCo doesn't want to fix our problems, they want to sell us an off-the-shelf product at a price tag that implies thousands of hours of dev work. So if you can show them that you can accommodate their needs quickly and without the usual obstructionism, technology dogmatism and nickel-and-dime-ing practices of BigSoftwareCo, there's definitely an opportunity to build a great relationship.
Not to mention BigCo's managers are highly averse to risk and won't put their bonuses and careers on the line by vouching for a small company that may or may not be around in a few years in case they need support or maintenance.
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As someone who works (not in IT) at a government-owned BigCo (2000 employees), let me tell you: building the software that will solve our problems will be the easy part. Navigating the bureaucracy of BigCo's procurement processes will probably take you more time, skill and money than actually building the product.
And it's not enough to have a product that solves a problem. BigCo never fixes things all at once. So whatever your product is, it'll have to work with innumerable poorly-documented legacy systems. Integrating with BigCo's existing, proprietary systems might take longer than developing the core of your actual product.
But the upshot is that BigCos are used to dealing with BigSoftwareCo that is just as slow and unresponsive in its development processes as BigCo itself. BigSoftwareCo doesn't want to fix our problems, they want to sell us an off-the-shelf product at a price tag that implies thousands of hours of dev work. So if you can show them that you can accommodate their needs quickly and without the usual obstructionism, technology dogmatism and nickel-and-dime-ing practices of BigSoftwareCo, there's definitely an opportunity to build a great relationship.
Not to mention BigCo's managers are highly averse to risk and won't put their bonuses and careers on the line by vouching for a small company that may or may not be around in a few years in case they need support or maintenance.