How Excel Became a $100 Billion Opportunity**
Presenting the work of Hiran de Silva. Red by Juniper.
There is a gap in the market.
Not a small inefficiency.
Not a tooling problem.
A structural gap created by perception itself.
And like all powerful gaps—it is invisible to those inside it.
De Silva’s claim is philosophical. But it is also deeply practical. Because once you see this gap, you begin to understand why a $20 per month tool sits at the centre of a $100 billion industry.
And supersedes it.
Two Worlds. One Tool. No ‘Known’ Connection.
This gap exists because of two widely held beliefs.
They are not just widely believed—they are actively fed, reinforced, and amplified.
The Mechanical World
Look at the vast amount of Excel content available today. Produced with amazingly high quality.
Courses.
YouTube tutorials.
LinkedIn posts.
Certifications.
An entire ecosystem.
We immediately see, rich, sophisticated, and highly valuable.
But look closer.
Almost all of it serves one purpose:
The execution of mechanical work.
Formulas.
Power Query steps.
Pivot tables.
Reconciliation techniques.
And here is the critical observation:
This world exists in isolation. When it actually doesn’t.
There is little or no acknowledgement that Excel sits within a broader business context. The Excel work is presented as an end in itself.
The journey becomes the destination.
Excel is taught as a sequence of steps to be mastered, refined, and optimised. Confined to a celebration of the vast myriad of features in Modern Excel —but rarely as a means to achieve a business outcome.
When a defined specific real-world outcome is put forward, even the experts shy away. So, what chance for the learners?
The Intellectual World
Now consider a different world.
The boardroom.
The CFO.
The finance leader.
This is the world of responsibility.
Here, Excel is not merely a tool. It is perceived as a risk.
Because in this world:
- Accounting errors and omissions occur. They are undetected
- Subsequent necessary adjustments obscure truth
- Trust, once lost, is almost impossible to recover
The greatest stress is not decision-making.
It is whether the numbers can be trusted. The numbers on which the decisions rest.
And this is tested every month.
Hiran experienced this early in his career. His decade in industry began as chief financial officer in a fast-moving media business, reporting to its owner, now-billionaire Richard Desmond. In the monthly magazines publishing industry, reporting cycles are tight. Often, information is incomplete. Uncertainties in the reported numbers, if unchecked, were glaringly embarrassing.
When anomalies are discovered later and corrected in subsequent periods, the problem doubles.
Every finance person knows this, you don’t just have incorrect numbers—you have corrections layered on top of incorrect numbers.
The result?
A set of reported figures that becomes increasingly difficult to explain, defend, or trust.
And yet those numbers are taken forward—into analysis, into Power BI dashboards, into decision-making.
Is FP&A talking about truth? Or an unseen and indeterminate collection of unchecked mistakes, omissions, and unknowns?
The Misalignment
Now we arrive at the core issue.
These two worlds:
- Use the same tool
- Depend on each other
- But do not understand each other
The mechanical world believes:
“We are doing Excel well.”
The intellectual world believes:
“Excel is the problem.”
Both are right.
The Birth of an Industry
This misalignment has created one of the largest opportunities in enterprise software.
The Excel replacement industry.
For over a decade, organisations have been told:
- Excel cannot scale
- Excel cannot collaborate
- Excel cannot consolidate
- Excel cannot be trusted
- Excel spreadsheets are fragmented. Silos.
These claims are well documented, widely circulated, and easy to demonstrate—based on how Excel is typically used today.
And so a narrative has taken hold:
If Excel is the problem, replace Excel.
It is a compelling argument.
And it has fuelled an industry worth a $100 Billions.
Why the Narrative Persists
Because it is based on what people can see.
And what people see is this:
- Manual processes
- Fragmented files
- Labour-intensive work
- Error-prone outputs
- Lack of vision of the required outcomes
So the conclusion feels logical.
But it is based on a false premise.
The Hidden Truth
The problem is not Excel.
The problem is how Excel is being used. The Current Practice.
More precisely:
Spreadsheets are being used as just isolated documents
instead of as a system.
That distinction changes everything.
The Gap
We can now define the gap clearly.
On one side:
- A world focused on manual execution
- Training centred on tasks
- Excel as a standalone tool
- Even ‘automation’ that means more manual work
On the other:
- A world focused on outcomes
- Accountability for results
- Excel judged by its failures
- Instead of Excel totally eliminating manual work, including what’s promoted as ‘automation’
Between them:
A vast, unaddressed gap.
And this gap is growing.
Because both sides are reinforcing their own perspectives.
The Miracle of Excel
This brings us to a claim Hiran has made for many years:
The miracle of Excel is that a ~$20 per month tool can outperform a $100 billion industry.
Not by working harder.
But by working differently.
The Missing Piece
The turning point in Hiran’s own work came from a simple realisation:
Separate the data from the spreadsheets.
That is all.
The seed for this line of thinking came from a 1993 Microsoft Global presentation by Satya Nadella, a young engineeer at Microsoft.
When you do this:
- Data becomes centralised
- Excel becomes a client. managing its data now located centrally
- Processes become connected
- Outputs become reliable
And suddenly:
- Consolidation works
- Collaboration works
- Auditability exists
- Scale is natural
What This Changes
This is not an incremental improvement.
It is a structural shift.
The mechanical work now requires no manual work—automated, works unattended, continuous, self checked. Hiran demonstrates this in the accompanying three live demonstrations.
As we see, the intellectual work becomes easier—clearer, faster, more reliable. The invicible mechanical work sets up the intellectual work to be more focused, efficient, and thorough.
And most importantly:
Trust is restored.
Why This Is Not Widely Seen
Because neither side is looking in the right place.
The mechanical world is focused on technique. As an end to itself.
The intellectual world has already concluded that Excel cannot meet its needs. And the alternatives offered by the Excel Replacement Industry have their own well-documented drawbacks.
So the solution remains hidden in plain sight.
The Opportunity
This is not just a technical insight.
It is a business opportunity.
Because when this gap is closed:
- The perceived limitations of Excel disappear
- The justification for replacement systems weakens
- The economics of enterprise systems change dramatically
- What ‘learning Excel’ means is radically changed
And the question becomes:
Why are we not doing this already?
The Demonstration
This is why Hiran focuses on demonstrations.
Not theory.
Not opinion.
But observable outcomes. Hiran shows us these examples.
- Account reconciliation at scale
- Budget review, at scale
- Real-time consolidation with global reach
Viewed not as techniques, but as business processes that require zero manual mechanical work.
And then a simple comparison:
What people are learning to do
versus what is actually possible.
The contrast is stark.
Final Thought
This is not a gap in technology.
It is a gap in thinking.
A gap sustained by:
- Mis-Learning
- Social Media Incentives
- Commercial interests
- Entrenched beliefs
But once seen—
It cannot be unseen.
End of piece, red by Juniper.
Add comment