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

The fact that this thread has failed (IMO) to adequately define it proves that the term Enterprise Class originates from the marketing dept. and, as such, is all about managing customer perception.

A system is only enterprise class if the customer perceives it to be so.

Just look at some applications suites which we'd all agree are "enterprise class": SAP, Oracle, CICs, DB2, ...

What do they have in common?

1. Expensive. A customer buying an affordable product just feels like a businessman or entrepeneur. They're badges with no class. Spending megabucks on an "enterprise class" system means that you're part of the big boys club: you're an Enterprise.
2. Big on research. Your enterprise customers must be made to feel that you're working tirelessly at the bleeding edge to make sure that the product they bought is better than the product their competitors bought. To be considered, you have to have a research budget and it has to be bigger than the GDP of Switzerland.
3. Room to grow. No matter how big and sprawling the customer's "enterprise" is right now, he has to feel that the system has room to grow with his ego power base business. The best way to give this impression is to list large companies amonsgt one's existing customers, even if your product only manages the janitorial shift. Another way to give this impression is to offer a pricing plan which is capable of swallowing all of the company's 3rd round of venture funding.
4. Professional Services. A customer feels special if they feel they warrant the personal attention of your best consultants. Your consultants are perceived as being the best if they cost a lot.
5. It all comes back down to money. The CEO/CFO already has the most brains and is obviously the only one who really knows how the company should spend money from one day to the next, but he just needs something which can make if obvious to the goons next to him. So the system must be able to slice and dice the data in any way he can think of (and ways that he hasn't thought of yet) so that he can point to the success of his initiatives and reward himself with that fancy new yacht or weekend in Monte Carlo. This means that the system must be able to capture every expenditure made by the enterprise and be able to relate it to one of three things: share price, productivity or profit. So, an enterprise class system allows the CFO to set up a summary for peanut butter consumption vs share price, or internet bandwidth vs. productivty, or (best of all) payroll vs. profit (annual bonus).

Based on these metrics, it looks like OpenACS won't qualify for the term Enterprise Class anytime soon, but why should it? There are far more compelling categories to put it in such practical, useful, economic, more scalable than your credit limit, etc.

I'm sure that the VCs were convinced that tcl and aolserver were creating cracks in the customer perception of aD as an enterprise vendour and so moved to Java as a way of papering over those cracks. And they'd have done it too, if it hadn't been for those pesky open source kids...

Yup, it's Monday.