It's a Space Ship

[akirlu]

Overheard somewhere, someone making disparaging remarks about "the boys in Enterprise"... I don't think they were talking about a television show, its fans, or cast members. Pretty sure they didn't mean rental car agents either. And with that I realized it's a new business buzzword, one that seems to have crept into various interstitial spaces in my peripheral awareness, yet I have absolutely no idea what it's pointing at. It's something Google sells, or does, or something. Is it software? Looking at their page it looks like maybe it's aps, which they call "solutions". Wikipedia seems to think it's another word for entrepreneurship, and I've seen some claiming that it is meant to reference risk-taking in business development. Or the fact that something is business activity aimed at making profit. I thought that was what we called capitalism. So I don't know. What the hell is Enterprise, anyway? Maybe it's meant to refer to Enterprise Systems, which clearly are software. I think.

*sigh* That's me, left behind on the curb by the jargon express again.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Enterprise - catch all phrase in the IT 'biz' for general enterprise software...so that's databases, networks, data storage, business focused apps and the like.

As a phrase it dates back certainly to the 1990s if not before... Probably before, as it would have been used to apply to Sun, Cisco, Oracle and a bunch of other companies that have been, and in some cases already vanished since the start of the PC age.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

In this sense, doesn't enterprise in particular mean used throughout a company? Like when something is standard on all computers -- and possibly even managed centrally. It could even be something like an antivirus thingy, IIRC. Also suggesting large corporations with thousands of compubers -- as opposed to, say, a small business that fits into a small storefront office somewhere.

I wonder also if this is kinda where the "rocket ship" comes from, that Sheryl Sandberg mentions in her book. Or if it's all tangled up, by geeks with MBAs or something.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

It can be more general than that, really just software used by businesses can fall into the category.

Most of it these days is virtual cloud based stuff like Salesforce or Concur.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

If Wikipedia is right-- it's happened before-- maybe someone is trying to combine the concepts of Marketing and Acquisitions without the attendant stigma of "lying to buyers and cheating sellers"?

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

*warm fuzzy feeling*

Then I am doing my job. :)

[miramon.livejournal.com]

Depends on context, but it sounds like they were using it as a synonym for "corporate" which would make sense if they were referring to a single business. So it's whatever the central coordinating/strategic function of the business is. There's also a tendency in IT to refer to big business solutions (like SAP) as "enterprisey" and they could be referring to general big business functions and the senior officers of multiple companies.

[ckd]

You know why some things are called "enterprise software"? It's because only Scotty could make them work right.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Kind of reverses the sense of "Och, laddie, ye didna tell him how long it would really take!", doesn't it?