Many software platforms claim that they are “built for enterprise“, but are they really?

Let’s break down what a large enterprise IT shop really needs:

• Great support

• Reliable technology

• Reasonable pricing

• Ability to get a competitive edge

• Minimal disruption to existing processes

• Longevity

• Ability to adapt or customize to unique standards and business process

Every company is going to claim it has the first two and being a competitor, not a customer, it is not my place to dispute that, so let start with the third item.

Reasonable pricing

Paying by the user is great from startups and early-stage companies, but for enterprise, it is the worst pricing model possible. We can say right off the bat that any company that has a per-user license fee is not really built for enterprise after all.

But there are other “gotchas”. What about companies that try to “lock-in” their customers with special runtime libraries that make it impossible to continue running apps with also continuing to pay a license fee. Is that really reasonable? Not for a large enterprise which absolutely must control its own destiny. It is not reasonable to demand that investments on the scale of enterprise applications be held hostage that way, preventing the customer from moving on if they are truly dissatisfied. So any company tries to lock you down in any way is not really reasonably priced either.

Ability to get a competitive edge

Citibank does not want to look exactly like every other bank out there, and Macy’s does not want to look like Bloomingdale’s. Large enterprise makes large investments in branding and identity, and being able to slap a logo on a template does not make the template better; it makes the brand worse. There aren’t any Fortune 500 websites based on WordPress templates.

Some platforms allow “customization” of template built apps. It will never be enough to give your designers the creative freedom they need to adhere to and enhance the brand identity in meaningful ways.

Any platform that does not allow unrestricted use of any programming language whatsoever (your designers might not be using CSS and Javascript, they are probably using LESS and CoffeeScript or TypeScript) cannot truly be said to be built for enterprise.

Minimal disruption to existing processes

Small companies can turn on a dime. A small company owner can arbitrarily decide that an entire department has to switch tools and retrain, no matter the cost in term of business disruption. Large companies do not work that way.

In an enterprise situation, the cost of disrupting tooling or business process necessarily includes multi-month (even multi-year) change management and training and transition plans. Change at that level is painful. A platform that was indeed built for enterprise would minimize disruption. It would allow the continued use of all existing toolsets and would plug into the business process as a transparent additional step.

Any platform that forces developers or designers to stop using familiar tools, or forces a new infrastructure on the operations team, or completely disrupts the deployment/delivery process definitely not built for enterprise.

Longevity

The world changes, especially the IT world. If this was not true, all enterprise programs would be written in COBOL and we know this is not the case.

Enterprise has enough problems with technology refresh as it is. A real enterprise solution would alleviate the problem by preserving application logic in a re-useable, programming language agnostic format, not aggravate it by burying business rules in a proprietary, locked-in platform. To assure longevity, a solution has to be designed from the ground up to support the real-life truth that programming languages change every decade or so.

A platform that aggravates the problem by tying up the results of priceless analysis into a language-specific solution is in no way built for enterprise.

Ability to adapt or customize to unique standards and business process

To summarize the previous points: large enterprise lives in a world of its own making. It cannot, and will not, change to fit into any else’s mold.

For a few years in the Nineties, it was fashionable to try and solve every IT requirement using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software. This did not last long, and today all successful large companies make substantial investments in in-house software development.

Ultimately, two iron rules cannot be broken: to gain a competitive edge a company has to differentiate and cannot be the same as everyone else, so it cannot be “handcuffed” into some third party’s idea of how they think everyone should work.

A solution or platform that imposes anything at all, whether it is a programming language, tools, infrastructure, or business process is ultimately not built for enterprise.

So?

To be built for enterprise, a solution has to, therefore:

• Provide great support

• Be based on proven reliable technology

• Be reasonably priced and not try and lock-in the customer

• Provide a truly customized solution (based on common technology) to each customer

• Work with all existing tools and minimally disrupt existing processes

• Be language agnostic and able to evolve as programming languages and techniques evolve

• Enhance an enterprise’s ability to create a unique brand idenity and experience

Neonto meets all of these criteria, and we believe that we are the only competitor that does. Make the right decision, choose Neonto.