CTO Articles
Published in IT World
June 19, 2007
The rise and fall of the 'enterprise' class distinction
For as long as I can remember, there has been a distinction drawn in this industry between IT that is suitable for use within an enterprise and IT that is not suitable for use within an enterprise.
In my formative years learning my trade the word 'enterprise' applied to things like Cobol, mini-computers and line printers. The word 'hobbyist' or 'home' was applied to things like the Basic programming language, Apple computers and floppy disks.
Over the years the distinction has survived but the items in each class have changed dramatically. Pretty much everything that used to be outside of the enterprise tent is now on the inside. There are 'personal' computers on every desk being put to serious enterprise uses - some of them are Apples. The Basic programming language, in the form of Microsoft Visual Basic, is used extensively in enterprise environments. Floppy disks are almost a thing of the past but have been replaced by even more 'personal' forms of storage such as iPods and USB disks. Again, these are increasingly being put to serious enterprise use.
It is interesting to ponder what the distinction between 'enterprise class' and 'non-enterprise class' IT means these days, if indeed, it means anything at all? As in so many other areas of IT, the Internet has had - and continues to have - a profound impact on the question. Twenty or thirty years ago, one could easily make a purely financial case for the enterprise class distinction. In order to have enough CPU power or disk space or whatever, enterprise-class money needed to be spent. Enterprise class IT was qualitatively different from non-enterprise class IT because of significant requirements in terms of performance, reliability, availability etc.
Folks attempting to use a similar differentiation strategy today are having a hard time. Forms of IT that some would consider 'non-enterprise class' such as Linux or PHP or RSS are being used on a daily basis to do all the things that the term 'enterprise-class' claims as its own. If 'enterprise class' means high reliability, high availability, high traffic capacity etc. then many of these so-called non-enterprise class technologies have these attributes in abundance.
This phenomenon - the gradual erosion of anything admirable behind the term 'enterprise class'- has resulted in the birth of a new pejorative term: enterprisey[1].
Those who continue to insist that the distinction has a factual basis at a technical level certainly have their work cut out for them.
[1] http://www.google.ie/search?q=enterprisey