Recently S. Lott published a post on what’s a clear definition of Enterprise-level applications. Even though I agree with him that “Enterprise-scale” definition has been streched by marketing to mean about anything, I have to disagree with his conclusions:

1. The fact that an enterprise running a mission-critical piece of software can actually survive to bad things(tm) by other means (falling short on their obligations?), doesn’t mean that the mission wasn’t critical, after all. Anyways, mission-critical is just a typical requisite for enterprise applications, not the definition of.
2. If the test is “if installer is next-next-done, then it’s not Enterprise”, it can be easily falsified by examples like Oracle database or Oracle business applications, which are definitely into the Enterprise set but are rather easy to install. Obviously you can achieve complex redundancy setups with Oracle DB or MySQL DB, and both of them require special configuration activities not provided by installer.

Read the rest of this entry »