11–20 of 25 posts
A site license is > 500 seats
Long, intensive sales cycles
Heavy support and uptime requirements
And I'm not against it or anything. It can be more work than small or med businesses but it's also significantly more money. In fact, the amount of money is probably inordinately more. So you can actually become more financially successful doing enterprise software.
"One size fits no-one" software
Sold by people who promise everything and deliver very little after a lot of high priced consultants customise it to what they think your requirements should be. Costs a fortune to buy and several more in 'maintenance' fees. New, incompatible version, is released a month after you go live.
* Is developed and delivered in big-bang style rather than incrementally.
* End users and support staff are not involved in purchase or evaluation.
* Primarily sold by offering decision makers (people with budget) tickets to the British Open, Premier League football, great meals, etc.
- Has often unnecessary hardware and software requirements to reduce sticker shock. For example, requires Solaris on SPARC and the database must be Oracle or MS SQL Server when it's just a glorified CRUD web app.
- Is buzzword-compliant (extra points for more esoteric buzzwords (like JSR-170 compliant)).
- Is often written in Java to allow your typical IT drone to write the necessary glue to integrate it with other enterprise software.
- Is excessively complex at all levels (UI/UX, configuration, extension).
- Is poorly documented due in part to the excessive complexity and more in part to the fat support contracts the vendors rely on.
- Makes your IT boss happy, because it continually uses up their yearly budget allotment, generates a lifetime of status meetings, and gives more of their subordinates something to do.
- Makes you, the IT worker, miserable because you have to continually fight it in order to keep it working.
- Makes you, the office worker, miserable because you have to continually fight it just to get anything done.
Or is critical to generating money not more than two removes from balance sheet.
I don't define most CRM as the above, but count CRM as a funnel. Reason: good sales bods used to do that in their head. So, for a sales app to be critical ("enterprise") you have to get to the bits an old school sales team can't do. It doesn't include lead search or credit analysis front of house. Critical in sales would be an engine which prices product in a way you secure sales over competitors. But that might be such a fluid piece of code, you'd never hard-wire it into any billing system.
If you're selling a service, that's obviously enterprise: no service, no money. But i think you were talking about internal apps here.
I dislike entrprise search / discovery being classified as entreprise. Archival matters. But you can always restore to a search server if you must, for legal e.g. later. If you need to use full text search to find line of business information, i think you've got a messy practise, to put it mildly. Yet, there sure is a lot of money in that space. My take is that such search utility is more a distraction, and at worst if used it ought to be rationed.
I started with my Razor, so i'll save typing any more expansions. I said 2 removes, to emphasise that in a enterprise sized company, if you go much further you have a very big graph to reduce as to what's important.
Seems everyone else here is going for Computer Contradictionary style answers. I'm trying to say that enterprise software is what you can't take away without losses. My org bonuses those in that trench in line with front of house / sales. Sometimes i think that enterprise software is deliberately arcane so that median salary employees can be "trusted" with apps near to the money because they'll have to be geniuses to know how anything works, and if they are, they'll leave. Whenever i get that feeling, a vendor gets shown the door.
Where management is prepared to spend a double digit % of revenue to achieve something. That "something" might be "anything".
Alt. answer #2:
When your Big Four accounting company junior uses vendor's name in familiar, knowing terms. Optionally, when any business novice tries to explain it to you in breathless excitement.
it takes all parts, processes and prices for those processes and generates reports.
Its enterprise to me because it could be valuable to many other companies.
If you can afford to rip it all out and replace it - without seriously risking blowing up your business, your entire revenue stream, or risking having to issue a mea culpa to a legal entity, or having to jack-hammer congealed product out of your mongo-million dollar manufacturing line - then it's not Enterprise code.
And yes, stuff that might not be traditionally thought of as an enterprise installation can fit this definition. The large-scale deployments of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Exchange and SitePoint can fit this definition, as can your own large-scale deployment of your own customized software platform, as can anything to do with financial verifications or controlled substances, too.