There was a big fuss made in April when Facebook Inc. acquired camera app maker Instagram for close to $1 billion.

But Eric Jackson of CapLinked Inc., an El Segundo startup that provides an online platform for companies to exchange financial documents, saw a different, less publicized tech deal as a more telling statement about the new app economy – and his own company.

In June, Redmond, Wash., software giant Microsoft Corp. purchased Yammer, a social network for businesses, for even more money: $1.2 billion.

To Jackson and CapLinked, which recently announced it raised $1.6 million in a second round of venture capital fundraising, the Yammer deal marked a point where the pendulum in tech swung away from consumer-focused companies and toward enterprise-oriented firms like his.

While Facebook, social game maker Zynga Inc. and couponing service Groupon Inc. have had public troubles and swooning stock prices, tech companies that provide services to businesses might be the surer bet.

“There’s a waning of enthusiasm for a lot of the consumer-oriented companies right now,” Jackson said. “Not to say those are bad companies or they won’t figure out how to turn it around, but the luster is off.”

The public face of the L.A. tech boom might be the monthly subscription e-commerce services for consumers or the online video creators with a direct line to Hollywood. But the region has also created a handful of enterprise software firms, led by Cornerstone OnDemand Inc. in Santa Monica, which makes server-based human resources apps for businesses.

The strong revenue that enterprise tech can bring in by charging clients a regular fee to access the service makes it an enticing choice for venture capital. That’s especially the case as the rush to create the next big consumer app creates a glut of companies with same-sounding ideas.

“There’s a lot of ‘me too’ in consumer tech right now,” said Eric Manlunas, a managing partner at Santa Monica’s Siemer Ventures LLC, which invested in CapLinked. “Meanwhile, there’s a huge market on the enterprise side that cannot be ignored. It’s becoming hotter again.”

Software as service

The process and inspiration for creating an enterprise software company are much the same as those for creating a consumer startup: look at an inefficiency in the way things are being done and find a way technology can improve it.

For CapLinked, that meant the ways companies exchanged documents in major financial transactions. Jackson, who was formerly the director of marketing at PayPal Inc., along with CapLinked co-founder and former investment banker Chris Grey, thought the loads of email exchanges with attached documents were messy and hard to track.

Their service is a cross between an online storage space and a social network. During a financial transaction, such as an investment round or merger, a business can post a document on a shared site for others to look at, edit and repost changes. The site also lets a company act as an administrator and make certain relevant files visible to some users but not others.

CapLinked makes money by charging businesses for access to these secure storage spaces; the rates vary by customer, though the standard cost is $200 a month. While Jackson declined to disclose revenue, he said the two-year-old company isn’t yet turning a profit but is likely to next year.

With the recent fundraising round, CapLinked is focused on adding clients and features to the site rather than becoming profitable. That refrain of building customers before making money is a common one for both enterprise and consumer companies.

“Of course we’re going to raise additional capital and not hold back our growth by relying only on revenue,” Jackson said. “But we’ve been able to raise slowly and responsibly so we’re doing it in a gradual, incremental way.”

But, unlike consumer tech, CapLinked has the advantage of selling a product to a freer spending customer. That $200 starting price might sound steep for a consumer coming from the land of ad-supported apps, but the businesses that need the service are often more than willing to shell out.

The rise of enterprise tech companies in the past few years has come along with the move toward server-based “cloud computing” software. Rather than sending out physical discs, enterprise tech firms sell access to online applications that perform all the software’s functions.

Cornerstone has been a successful and profitable company in selling this online-based software to businesses. At 13-years-old, Cornerstone is among the older local tech firms, and has been a hit with investors since going public last year.

The company’s chief executive, Adam Miller, sees its success, along with all those in enterprise tech, as the result of continued growth from a reliable customer.

“Consumers can be fickle: One day they like you the next they won’t,” Miller said. “And consumer tech requires huge marketing investments. The returns are high, but the investment is high, too.”

Consumer trends

Miller concedes that much of the improvements in enterprise applications that have helped Cornerstone flourish have been inspired largely by trends in consumer apps. Companies now expect the same clear, user-friendly design that’s standard in mobile apps to be present in enterprise software.

That certainly is the case with CapLinked, which looked to popular consumer services such as DropBox as the basis for its inspiration.

Despite the favored status that enterprise tech companies might be enjoying currently, enterprise tech is still not a guaranteed winner. BetterWorks, a prominent L.A. company that managed employee perks for businesses, shuttered in May. The fact that BetterWorks was run by successful entrepreneur Paige Craig shows that any company no matter who its customers are isn’t immune to the volatile startup economy. One of the obstacles for BetterWorks was the difficulty in building a clientele of small to medium businesses. Convincing the many corporate layers at a single company to sign up for a product is a lot more work and time consuming than attracting a consumer.

“The sales cycle can be long and complicated in enterprise software. Your team needs to get people like the company’s chief information officer to buy the product, and that takes time,” Craig said. “There’s no I.T. guy for consumer tech.”

As Jackson and the other local enterprise tech firms enjoy their renewed interest among investors, there’s a sense of getting some credit that’s long overdue, even if what they’re creating might not be as catchy as a picture-taking app such as Instagram.

“What we and others are working on is saving millions of dollars in different businesses,” Jackson said. “What we’re doing is also transformative – just in a very different way.”