For those reading this blog who are not fans of boxing, Filipino boxer (and what many say is the best pound-for-pound fighter in the ring today) Manny Pacquiao, beat American-Mexican Oscar, the “Golden Boy” dela Hoya last December 6 in Las Vegas Nevada (December 7 in Manila, Philippines).

What was widely considered a mismatch with a fight pitting the taller and naturally heavier American versus the smaller Filipino fighter proved true but not in the way many pundits expected. By the beginning of the ninth round of the fight, a badly beaten and tired dela Hoya surrendered to the smaller, faster and more accurate punching power of Pacquiao–ending what was largely a one-sided fight.

Now this fight has already been widely dissected and analyzed by experts and boxing fans for its place in history. I want to look at it from a different perspective by using what happened as an analogy to describe what I feel is happening in the enterprise software industry today.

In the software industry, there is brewing match up between the bigger and more established enterprise software vendors versus the smaller, faster, entrepreneurial software startups in the industry today.

In areas as diverse as business applications, network and systems management, unified communications, office productivity, security, and many others; a growing force of software startups are becoming a disruptive force in the industry for the incumbents.

In a talk I did on CRM a few weeks ago for an executive briefing organized by Computerworld Magazine in our city, I mentioned two potent and disruptive forces in the industry that together make up the “perfect storm” for change in software and services:

The first is open source. Open source as a business, software development, and distribution model has allowed communities of people–working on their own or within small entrepreneurial companies, to develop software in a quicker and more agile way than traditional software development approaches.

In enterprise software, an interesting case study is SugarCRM. In the CRM market, SugarCRM competes with the likes of Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com and to some extent Siebel CRM (now Oracle). Like Manny Pacquiao, SugarCRM is a David in a market of Goliaths. To compete, it tries to continuously outflank the big guys and hit them on all sides by offering customers more options in terms of platform (it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, Unix), extensibility (it has a growing ecosystem of third party developers), and delivery (it is available “on-premise” as installed server software or “on-demand” in the Cloud).

The second is SaaS and/or cloud computing. SaaS or cloud computing is another interesting development. In SaaS, software is delivered, used and consumed purely online (or as marketers call it–in the “cloud”). Companies with SaaS as a delivery platform compete like Manny Pacquiao against the big guys by using speed. SaaS deployments, unlike traditional enterprise software, don’t require the time consuming setup of supporting infrastructure such as servers, operating systems and databases to get started. SaaS deployments and updates are also faster with its one platform-to-many users architecture. When users log in, they get instant access to new features as they are added and rolled out–providing a superior customer experience and not to mention a more economical and efficient method of delivery.

Take the case of up and coming SaaS player Zoho. In the span of just three years, it has come up with a veritable smörgåsbord of applications used by over 1 million users. Virtually every month or quarter, it posts a slew of new features and updates that has competitors scratching their heads as they are left in the dust in terms of features and functionality.

Other areas. There is a whole lot of case studies where the Davids of the enterprise software world are beating the Goliaths. Companies such as open source IP-PBX vendor Fonality going against the Avayas and the Nortels. Companies such as unified threat managament vendor Untangle going against the SonicWalls. Companies such as open source document management solutions Alfresco going against the Documentums.