Enterprise Application Software: The Ultimate Guidelines
In general, software applications can be customized, depending on different requirements, platforms, user bases, etc. Among them all, one of the most popular types is Enterprise Application Software (EAS).
The 'Enterprise Application Software' is aptly named; to meet the business requirements of an enterprise. This type of software is usually of large scale and fulfills various aspects of a business organization. The EAS (Enterprise Application Software) can be either an individual software distributed across the organizational structure or different enterprise software applications that function for different needs.
In this article, let's examine EAS in detail and understand the differences between EAS and the other types of software.
Enterprise Definition
Before we get into EAS, let's try to understand what enterprise is. The word 'Enterprise' can literally mean a business organization, most often a business venture on a large scale.
The term 'Enterprise' can refer to any business venture such as a single self-employed entrepreneur, or even small and medium-sized enterprises. However, this particular term is mostly used to describe a large-size company/organization that has several business functions, not only in the private sector as well as the public one. Some of the common enterprise organizations include Multinational companies (MNC) or medium to large scale local businesses; federal, state, or local government entities, etc.
A common factor among the business entities listed above is that those employees working in an enterprise environment often need access to a large amount of data and information or functions to perform their job roles, such as sales, customer services, IT, finance, or analysts. In terms of data requirements, it can encompass different needs from sales and marketing data, customer data, employee performance, legal and compliance, audit trails, security, etc.
Generally speaking, a large organization with a relatively large number of employees having different roles, as well as performing different functions is called an enterprise.
Overview of Enterprise Application Software
Now that we all have somewhat of an understanding of what an enterprise is, let's take a closer look at enterprise application software (a.k.a enterprise software). Because enterprise applications are built to meet the needs of the business, a fairly wide range of requirements must be covered in the functionalities and features of those applications.
A noticeable thing that comes to mind with this type of application is the scale of its functions. More importantly, EAS is essential for an enterprise because it provides the solution to solve specific, critical business challenges of such an enterprise at scale.
Simply put, Enterprise Application Software refers to specific software that carries out almost all of the tasks associated with an enterprise environment.
Enterprise Application Software Features
Enterprise software can be divided into two categories:
- Software that facilitates and supports business processes, from business operations to automation.
- Software that deals with data at scale in a complex way including manipulating, reporting, and storing a large amount of data. It should be noted that even though data warehouse or data analytics software is enterprise solutions, they fall outside the EAS category as both of them are considered separate software.
Both types of enterprise software can have different features depending on the basic needs. However, the following properties can be commonly observed.
- The ability to accommodate business growth & Robustness. Not only enterprise software but every software application also needs to be robust and have room for scalability. Enterprise software must be able to adapt to the business needs of a growing organization without negatively impacting its reliability or functionality.
- Extensive coverage. Even though the enterprise software is usually managed in a central place, this particular type of software needs to be able to handle the entire organization's various operations that might disperse in different geographical areas. Therefore, it needs to perform and function extensively, supporting the organization's workforce across different locations around the globe. This is especially important for multinational companies (MNC) that require enterprise software to have the ability to support many individual remote workers, due to the fact that more organizations are driven by remote workforces nowadays.
- Meeting the requirements of complex and large-scale business. Enterprise application software is usually mission-critical and provides advanced tools and functionalities, including API for integration, that enables an organization to achieve its goals.
- Flexible and Extensible nature. As the world is transitioning to a digital economy, business needs might also change rapidly and unexpectedly. In such a context, EAS is supposed to be flexible so that it can quickly adapt to changes ensuring minimal modifications or customization without affecting the overall business process across the organization. Moreover, an EAS must be able to interact with other services and platforms which are typically utilized by the enterprise by leveraging an API, plugins, extensions, etc.
Types of enterprise software:
Depending on the different requirements of the organization, there are specific custom-tailored EAS. Some of the enterprise software applications are listed below and categorized according to department or organization needs:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM), for example, Salesforce CRM;
- HR Management Systems
- Email Marketing & Marketing Automation System like Adobe Campaign;
- Incident Management Systems
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), for example, SAP ERP;
- Project and Portfolio management systems, like JIRA;
- Supply-chain-management Software (SCM)
- Office Suites
- And more
All of the above software is designed to meet a variety of business needs. In most cases, a typical business organization uses multiple systems to fulfill all its requirements (because there is virtually no single enterprise software that can meet all the business needs of an enterprise).
This is where the enterprise scalability mentioned above works since EAS with a wider range of connectivity options, consisting of other platforms, allows the enterprise to select and integrate multiple EAS in order to meet their needs without being tied to only one specific vendor.
How is enterprise application software different from other software?
We have discussed what EAS is and the different kinds of EAS that are available in the previous sections. So what factor has the direct effect on EAS that makes it different from other types of software? It can be classified into two to three categories of system software, programming software, and application software, as follow:
- System software. This software is the foundation that allows users to install application software and run it as well as provides an interface between the application software (explained below) and the underlying hardware resources. Enterprise editions of Operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux are among the popular examples.
- Programming software. Refers to the type of software that provides software developers and engineers tools such as text editors, compilers, etc., and other tools to write and create code.
- Application software. The application software runs on the foundation that is the system software (operating system), and its main role is to provide various functionality to the users. This software can be either a word processing application (e.g. MS Word, or Google Docs, etc.) or a design application (e.g. Adobe Photoshop), a point of sales application, or even more complex applications such as inventory planning and manufacturing software, AI, and machine learning software like predictive analytics systems, etc. EAS generally falls under the application software category.
Not only do single individuals use typical application software such as email clients and document editors, but the enterprises also do. However, it is worth mentioning that this software does not belong to the EAS category.
In addition to its scale, EAS is characterized by the fact that it can be used by different business users who work in different departments for collaboration and provides particular functionality that is targeted at certain business needs.
Choosing the most suitable EAS solution for your enterprise
Enterprise Application Software or Enterprise Software has played an initial role in the success of many top enterprises. However, it is not an easy task to choose the right EAS solution since there are quite a number of different EAS solutions that are available for different business needs.
SaaS gives businesses more options to choose the ideal EAS solution depending on their specific requirements without having to pay for the upfront investments.
Side-notes:
TPP Software is a leading software company in Vietnam that has been supporting enterprise organizations for many years. Any part of your organization can practically benefit from our solutions which are diverse from solutions for service and operation management, and workload automation, to the mainframe.
