What constitute an enterprise promise?

[DPKJ]

Every application that I deploy has to be an enterprise class, as per me the convention was,

• handle enterprise load,
• almost zero downtime, and
• great support.

Jira and Confluence are both great example.

What are other people takes on this?

[Craig Castle-Mead]

While there’s going to be overlap between various enterprises - I think the answer here is a product that meets the requirements of your specific company. Your industry and regions you operate in may dictate auditing/change management/compliance requirements that others do not. Also the scale and complexity of the enterprise (big org with small variances in teams or a big org that is very diverse). On top of this, what is the companies mission and how does that align with how the software needs to support the business?

Given the above though, I’d say the below would be commonly needed requirements in some combination:

- well supported (direct by the vendor/ISVs)

- extensible/integratable (solid API)

- performant at scale (amount of data)

- performant over a wide geography (users not in a single area) - be that geodistributed, CDN etc

- user management - ties in to existing enterprise auth like AD/LDAP/SAML

- audit - strong record of change

- reporting - allow users to get access to the data in a way that makes sense to them

- highly available (in BAU, but if you cannot have much downtime consider the upgrade process too)

- does not rely on outdated third party packages

- has a self-hosted version and/or can control/understand data sovereignty

- good balance of feature release and stability 

that’s what comes to mind at the moment but I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few

CCM

[DPKJ]

Great points of importance.

This deserve an article.

[Matt Doar]

For enterprise software I also expect to see:

1. Well implemented data life cycles. For example users change names over time, groups change names. Users go inactive then are reactivated. All this needs strong support

2. Strong constraints. Everything should have a limit. Even if a user never adds 1000 comments to an issue, as soon as your app has a REST API, someone will end up doing that. There should be checks on everything in the app to limit the amount of testing you have to do when developing it.