Components of enterprise software

What constitues an enterprise level software? This is a very open question and one will hear different answers depending on who they talk to. However the essence remains restricted to a few core values that distinguish an enterprise software from any other.

My experience working on the product enterprise system for almost 7 years now has given me a good knowledge on what to look for when designing and implementing a system. These are not rocket science concepts but rather foundational ones that could be bypassed easily during development.

So what are they key elements:

  1. An enterprise software is reliable. This is a P1 requirement for any software that is developed. If the system does not behave the same way under the same circumstances, it is as good as not using it. The users of the system should trust the application.
    An enterprise software achieves a quality standard. Years of commitment on the product makes it rock solid and makes sure system behaves consistently in all areas. A buggy system would be essentially treated as unreliable by the users.
  2. An enterprise software is secure. This has become a very important aspect these days. With the softwares increasing relying on the cloud, it is exposed to traffic from all sorts of users, hackers, web crawlers, search engines, etc. Cross site scripting, sql injection, insecure file upload, cookie poisoning are issues that need to be handled along with file system security, firewall and access to ports, access to stored content, proper authentication mechanisms and auditing of attempts to break into the system.
  3. An enterprise software is usable. There are several good products that could not succeed because of the cumbersome manner they had to be used. It also leads to difficultly to understand how the software works and most likely lead to incorrect interpretations. Intuitive interface should drive the usability aspect of the software.
  4. An enterprise software scales. What this means is if we continue to use the system, it can withstand the load or wear and tear for the next few years without requiring major overhaul. It has already been built to last. It allows adding more severs or hardware to boost the performance and does not choke at a small threshold.
  5. An enteprise software handles technical aspects of software. Any software needs to make sure that multi-threaded scenarios are handled, proper initialization of application state is done, provides good mechanism to instrument and log information for diagnostic analysis. It also uses resources efficiently such as closing connections, file handles, obtaining and releasing locks and informing errors to end user in a manner that is user friendly yet does not reveal sensitive information.

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