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).

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

Every computer, data center and even smartphone breaks down into the three main infrastructure components:…