Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to What does "Enterprise Class" mean?

Talli, you're hurting me. Stop. It's Sunday, I just woke up, all available arm real estate is covered in club stamps, and I seem to have found a bum ankle. And I wake up to this? Bah. At least I still know where my pants are this time.

Enterprise Class. Funny story there. As we all know, all technical terms describing suitability are defined in constrained agreement between suits and techies, both of whom are lying to each other just as fast as they can, both trying to avoid being replaced by a very small perl script. Remember also that techies form phrases out of in-jokes to nerd culture. With this in mind, we can examine the etymology of 'Enterprise Class' as applied to computers. It means 'capable of driving the USS Starship Enterprise'. No seriously:

1. Stable: only crashes when attacked by aliens, for instance, intelligent nanoprobes or guys from marketing.
2. Extendible: painlessly interfaces with a variety of devices, such as medical scanners, docwolf's "energy drinks", weapons, small planets, and men who go mad and tie their brains in directly.
3. Hidden: no one ever sees an 'Enterprise Class' computer. It may even be gerbil-powered.
4. User Friendly: usable by persons born 6 centuries before its construction, or in our case, just before the italian renaissance. It may be I18N, but everyone speaks English anyway.
5. Persistent: capable of defying logic or physical reality. Things like "compute our chances in that paradox', or 'Enron Central, please hide all this money forever' are commonalities with 'Enterprise Class'.
6. Clean: there is no pr0n anywhere on the server. This may be more improbable than the previous 5 design goals.

Stupid, yes, but I submit that the above are just as valid a definition as the confused sales pitches of the auto-fellating computer media.

I will, however, post a serious rebuttal. I had the misfortune of working on 'Enterprise Class' back in 98-99. Big old IBM mainframes, VM-VXes from the early 80's. Refrigerator sized hard drives; components soldered onto breadboard (back then IBM still hadn't moved everything to ICs and modern fabs). So here's my impression of actual 'Enterprise Class' Computing:

1. Old. When you find something that works, you stick with it. Setting up such a system demands you toss out all notions of technology as sexy or innovative. I first bought into the ACS when philg wrote "We ignored technology startups. We ignored Windows NT. We used the same technology we had used since 1994." et cetera.
2. Service faster than your local fast food joint. One to Four hour service contracts. Things break. Life sucks.
3. Available source. I think this is the most important. I didn't say "open" just "available". You'd be laughed out of the glass room if you tried selling a mainframe without source. And I say this not as an OSS partisan, but as the poor bastard who had to keep this stuff running. The customer will have people crawling all over that source.

Your 7 points are certainly important. But I think they're baseline these days, and not sufficient. 'scalability, security, interoperability' fits my definition of "Software that isn't crap." And people that want your seven points but not my additional three should understand that don't need 'Enterprise', just quality. The above seven points would fit a system comprised of a linux box, Rolf, and a nearby pizza place.