What is Enterprise IT?

o IT Solutions to solve an enterprise problem (rather than a departmental problem) and often written using Enterprise Software Architecture. Generally, enterprise IT models the entire business enterprise and is the core IT system of governing the enterprise and the core of communication with the enterprise.

o Generally an IT group within the organization implements these solutions. An alternative model is On-demand software (IBM), or Software as a Service.

This ‘on-demand’ model of enterprise software is made possible through the widespread distribution of broadband access to the Internet. Software as a Service vendors maintain enterprise software on servers within their own enterprise data center and then provide access to the software to their enterprise customers via the Internet.

o As many business enterprises have similar departments and systems, enterprise software is often available as a suite of programs that have attached enterprise development tools to modify the common programs for the specific enterprise. Generally, these development tools are complex enterprise programming tools that require specialist capabilities (SAP, Oracle specialists etc).

o The ultimate Goal: Achieve process excellence and improve business goals by effectively leveraging IT solutions to support (or realize) the business process.

o In practice, the term ‘enterprise’ is applied much more often to larger organizations than smaller ones. Often the term is used to mean virtually anything, by virtue of its having become the latest corporate-speak buzzword

o Characteristics of Enterprise IT Software

• Fundamental requirements of Enterprise IT software: • Good Performance • Flexible Scalability • Absolute Robustness.

• Enterprise software typically has interfaces to other enterprise software (for example LDAP to directory services) and is centrally managed by dashboards.

• It is frequently hosted on servers and simultaneously provides services to a large number of enterprises, typically over a computer network. This is in contrast to the more common single-user software applications which run on a user's own local computer and serve only one user at a time.

Useful references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_2.0