What does "enterprise software" mean, anyway?

I'm a systems analyst at a reasonably large company, and in my company's context "enterprise software" tends to mean large, scalable, "vanilla" software packages (like our client management system) that allow for easy rollout at various nationwide sites with little in the way of "hands on" implentation support. "enterprise" just means the software is overblown, buggy, has a lot of messy code and costs a few million dollars. Welcome to corporate America. Most "enterprise apps" probably started life as a beautiful, shiny kernel of code that sang arias, but over the years became patched, added on to, and torn apart and rebuilt so many times that it bears little resemblance to the original - and the original developers are probably not around any more to make sense of the mess.

See http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/51967 posted half an hour before yours...

Enterprise software that is sold, rather than in-house: is scalable.has central administration.is customizable.uses standards like LDAP.checks all the boxes on an RFP, like SOX and SAS 70.

See this thread posted half an hour before yours... I don't want to frighten you, kindall, but I think you may be able to time travel.

In a lot of cases it's just a talking point, a way of saying "this sounds important". In other contexts it does have a shred of meaning to it, along smackfu's list. You can definitely classify some software as "hobby grade" or what-have-you, e.g. if it doesn't have a large organization backing it and selling support contracts, it can't be remotely administered and silently installed/upgraded, etc. But more often than not the word just falls into meaninglessness when used in any kind of non-specific context, when it's not referring to some specific set of features.

Scale, as others have noted, is key here, as (typically) is uptime/availability, which has led to the concept of "five nines," (99.999% of uptime per year, or about 5 minutes downtime) as a holy grail for enterprise level systems. Small office/home office, and consumer level software/systems don't typically have those kinds of expectations.

An Enterprise Application often comes with a support package. In other words, some one to yell at/take the blame/fix for free any problems that arise. As an added burecrat bonus, this allows dodgy IT groups to collect/generate requirements rather than solutions, and blame vendors when the solutions don't measure up (regardless of the actual requirements produced). I wonder if that section made it into your text book?

Scale is a big one. Can the product in question handle thousands or tens of thousands or millions of whatever entities it manages/manipulates? Could you imagine a company like IBM or General Motors with hundreds of thousands of potential users be able to use this product effectively. Control is another one is that is key. Can a centralized group of people control what all the appropriate users can do with a system. Can the appropriate permissions be delegated to others effectively or to scale out administration do you have to handle the keys to the kingdom to too many people.

As far as I can tell with my (limited) experience, "enterprise" just means the software is overblown, buggy, has a lot of messy code and costs a few million dollars. My thoughts exactly. While the answers above are well-thought out and really get to the heart of the question, they lack the required snarkiness of Metafilter, esp. when something as loathsome as "Enterprise software" is being discussed. Without a single exception, every piece of "Enterprise software" my company has purchased has been a horrible choice. It's just unholy how much money we've spent for buggy, messy code that only partially fulfills our requirements. And, anyone that talks about using C# because it's more "enterprise" clearly has little interest in programming. Double goes for J2EE. Your favorite Enterprise software sucks. Really, it does.