What is the best criteria to say an application is ENTERPRISE ?

Question

Hi guys,

What is the best way to say an application is Enterprise? Is it because of being able to integrated with other applications, being able to use other "Enterprise" applications or ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Wikipedia Article

Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software (EAS), is software used in organizations, such as a business or government,1 as opposed to software chosen by individuals (for example, retail software).

Services provided by enterprise software are typically business-oriented tools such as online shopping and online payment processing, interactive product catalogue, automated billing systems, security, content management, IT Service Management, Customer relationship management (CRM), Enterprise resource planning, Business intelligence, HR Management, Manufacturing, EAI, Enterprise Forms Automation, etc.

There is no single, widely accepted list of enterprise software characteristics,[2] this section is intended to summarize definitions from multiple sources.

The enterprise software is a collection of computer programs with common business applications, tools for modeling how the entire organization works, and development tools for building applications unique to the organization.The software is intended to solve an enterprise problem (rather than a departmental problem) and often written using an Enterprise Software Architecture.

Capterra broadly defines enterprise software in the following manner:

• Targets any type of organization corporations, partnerships, sole proprietorships, nonprofits, government agencies but not consumers.
• Targets any industry.
• Targets both large and small organizations from Fortune 500 to "mom and pop" businesses.
• Includes function-specific (Accounting, HR, Supply Chain, etc.) and industry-specific (Manufacturing, Retail, Healthcare, etc.) solutions.

ETC...

Answer 2

Check out this link. I think it has a good explanation about what constitutes enterprise software.

As indicated in the link above, some of the very important qualities that an application should exhibit in order to be considered "Enterprise" include :-

• Availability - the assurance that a service/resource is always accessible
• Scalability - the ability to support the required quality of service as the load increases
• Reliability - the assurance of the integrity and consistency of the application and all of its transactions. The ability to provide a required reliability service level depends on the close coordination of the hardware, networking, operating system, storage subsystem, application framework, and application software.
• Security - the ability to allow access to application functions and data to some users and deny them to others
• Interoperability - the ability of the system to share data with external systems and interface to external systems.
• Leveragability - the ability that stored data, programmed logic, and other system resources available anywhere in the enterprise should be accessible from everywhere in the enterprise
• Maintainability - the ability to correct flaws in the existing functionality without impacting other components/systems
• Extensibility - the ability to add/modify functionality without impacting existing functionality
• Manageability - the ability to manage the system in order to ensure the continued health of a system with respect to scalability, reliability, availability, performance, and security.
• Portability - the ability of the software to run on a variety of hardware and operating system configurations
• Accessibility - the ability to access system functions through different user agents and in different human languages

As with most applications, implementing the above - ilities is usually a questions of trade-offs because of the very nature of the - ilities.

In case of "Enterprise applications" i think that it is the priority of some of these -ilities over others that is different eg : Availability is usually very high in terms of priority for an enterprise application and other -itilies might be sacrificed for the cause of availability.

Of course, in the end it all depends on the business nature of the application and its usage. But in general, enterprise applications are applications that are inevitably crucial to the business.