The healthcare industry runs on Epic and Meditech. Construction runs on Viewpoint and Sage. Legal runs on Elite and Aderant. These legacy systems are expensive, have terrible UX, are slow to update, and are hated by the practitioners who use them daily.
They're also deeply embedded, have 20 years of customer data, and have compliance certification that new entrants don't have. The displacement challenge is real.
But the displacement opportunity is larger. The total value of legacy vertical ERP contracts being renewed annually in the US is estimated at $30-40B. Every one of those renewals is a potential win for a modern vertical SaaS player who has solved the displacement problem.
The displacement playbook:
Don't try to replace the whole ERP first. Displace one critical workflow that's adjacent to the ERP but not the ERP's core strength. The best-of-breed approach: be better at one specific workflow than the ERP, integrate with the ERP to avoid data migration, and expand from there.
Win the practitioners before you win the decision-makers. The ERP replacement decision is made by finance and IT, but influenced heavily by the practitioners who use the system daily. Build a product so much better on the workflow that practitioners advocate for replacement. The bottom-up adoption in a single department that demonstrates ROI is the sales leverage point.
Invest in data migration tooling early. The primary objection to replacing legacy vertical systems is data migration risk. If you build and publish high-quality migration tooling — "migrate from Epic/Viewpoint/Elite in X days" — you remove the primary objection. This is a product investment that directly accelerates sales.
Price the first displacement affordably. Your goal is to get into the account and prove value, not to maximize initial ACV. The enterprise deal comes after the beachhead department deployment proves the ROI case.
Legacy systems are your best reference point. Every customer they have is a potential displacement target.