Why are so many people confused about "Enterprise" software?

[Kyle Schmitt]

Really, why are so many people confused about "Enterprise" software,
or what "Enterprise Ruby" would be?

Enterprise software is not in any way, faster, more scalable, more
reliable, or better written than non enterprise software.
People need to get over thinking that that's the way to make it "Enterprise"

It boils down to a few things: availability of paid support;
availability of _experienced_ contractors; someone else using it
first.

Paid Support: It's the difference between RHEL and CentOS. If you can
get paid support for it, you have someone to turn to at 3AM when all
the systems are down, and your best developers and sys admins have
been working on too little sleep for too long to fix it.

Contractors: Enterprise systems always need (substantially) more
people to implement that to run, so experienced, professional
contractors need to be available to supplement employees. More than
that, they need to be there to teach, coax and nurse the company
through the transition to whatever.

Someone else using it first: Sad but true, "Enterprise" level
customers are by and large cowards. They won't, and in their defense
often can't, take the kind of risk that accompanies being the first
adopters of a technology into their arena.

So, you want to make ruby an "Enterprise" language?

* Start a consultancy offering packaged and to order ruby solutions,
hefty support contracts, and contractors you can hire out.

* Become an established contractor (yes it takes time, no it's not
overnight), and start offering or nudging clients into ruby
applications.

* Write some killer business app in ruby. Maybe a financial/supply
chain/delivery resource management system that small to medium
companies can actually afford.

* Make a startup company that uses ruby exclusively, and be mega
successful. Make billions of dollars and advertise that you use ruby.
And hire me for a modest (8 figure) salary if I haven't don't have
my own mega successful startup at that point


Am I doing anything like that for ruby now? Well... probably not
enough either, but if you wanna make ruby "Enterprise", think about
those things.

--Kyle

 

[Roger Pack]

* Make a startup company that uses ruby exclusively, and be mega

successful. Make billions of dollars and advertise that you use ruby.
And hire me for a modest (8 figure) salary if I haven't don't have
my own mega successful startup at that point

Count me in!

You're right I used the wrong term. Enterprise means what you said it
does. I meant...'efficient and fast' I don't know what you call that.
Optimized?

Take care!
-Roger

 

[Kyle Schmitt]

Count me in!

You're right I used the wrong term. Enterprise means what you said it
does. I meant...'efficient and fast' I don't know what you call that.
Optimized?

Take care!
-Roger

I'd say optimized yea.
But I don't think you're the first person to bring up the idea of
"Enterprise Ruby" like that.

As far as a better GC goes in a default distro, that'd be great, but
I'm still holding out for ruby 2 and yarv
--Kyle

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

So, you want to make ruby an "Enterprise" language?

* Start a consultancy offering packaged and to order ruby solutions,
hefty support contracts, and contractors you can hire out.

I think there are some of these -- at least for Rails, if not for
"general Ruby programming", whatever that is.

* Become an established contractor (yes it takes time, no it's not
overnight), and start offering or nudging clients into ruby
applications.

I'd say, don't nudge. Define your niche as Ruby programming and let
other people do the other languages.

* Write some killer business app in ruby. Maybe a financial/supply
chain/delivery resource management system that small to medium
companies can actually afford.

Again, I'm going to say "niche". You need a narrower focus than "small
to medium companies".

* Make a startup company that uses ruby exclusively, and be mega
successful. Make billions of dollars and advertise that you use ruby.
And hire me for a modest (8 figure) salary if I haven't don't have
my own mega successful startup at that point

Well ... either that or sell out and cry as your elegant Ruby solution
gets rewritten in C++ or Java.

Just kidding ... nobody can actually *write* C++ code!

 

[Robert Klemme]

Well ... either that or sell out and cry as your elegant Ruby solution
gets rewritten in C++ or Java.

Just kidding ... nobody can actually *write* C++ code!

Oh, and I thought the issue was nobody can actually *read* C++ code -
apart from a compiler of course.

robert

 

[Rick DeNatale]

Oh, and I thought the issue was nobody can actually *read* C++ code -
apart from a compiler of course.

No it works both ways.

Sometime in the 80s I just happened to be visiting the Apple booth at
OOPSLA, when Bjarne Stroustrup wandered by.

Apple had just released their first C++ compiler for the Macintosh
Programmers Workshop, starting their move from Object Pascal to C++.

The booth guys motioned Bjarne over to the stand where they were
featuring the C++ tools, and Bjarne typed in a short "hello worldish"
program.

It only took him about four or five tries before he got it to compile.

And it wasn't because the compiler was buggy.

 

[Alexey Verkhovsky]

It boils down to a few things: availability of paid support;
availability of _experienced_ contractors; someone else using it
first.

In my books, the defining feature of the Big Corporate IT (aka
Enterprise) is "a zoo of technologies spanning the last 15-30 years of
the history of computing, that need special care, feeding and an
ability to talk to each other".

Otherwise, your post gave me a few chuckles because you just about
gave a bullet point list of everything ThoughtWorks has done / is
doing to help Ruby cross the chasm. Save for the "killer business app"
thing...

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

In my books, the defining feature of the Big Corporate IT (aka
Enterprise) is "a zoo of technologies spanning the last 15-30 years of
the history of computing, that need special care, feeding and an
ability to talk to each other".

Otherwise, your post gave me a few chuckles because you just about
gave a bullet point list of everything ThoughtWorks has done / is
doing to help Ruby cross the chasm. Save for the "killer business app"
thing...

Actually, as I almost posted in another thread, I think Ruby has two
strong niches. One is Rails, of course. But the other is the whole
milieu of continuous integration, test-driven and behavior-driven
development, and "pragmatic/agile" processes. I personally think *that*
is a killer business app. After all, given all of that infrastructure,
there's no reason you can't use it to develop non-Ruby software,
hardware, airliners, motor vehicles or the tax code for a medium-sized
nation, is there?

 

[David A. Black]

Hi --

Actually, as I almost posted in another thread, I think Ruby has two strong
niches. One is Rails, of course. But the other is the whole milieu of
continuous integration, test-driven and behavior-driven development, and
"pragmatic/agile" processes. I personally think *that* is a killer business
app. After all, given all of that infrastructure, there's no reason you can't
use it to develop non-Ruby software, hardware, airliners, motor vehicles or
the tax code for a medium-sized nation, is there?

Before Rails, discussions about what Ruby's sweetest spot might be
often involved testing and development tools. Rarely did anyone
mention Web stuff at all; I think we all more or less figured that had
been taken already. (Not that there weren't Web libraries and
frameworks in Ruby before Rails, but I never heard anyone suggest that
the first Ruby "killer app" would be a Web framework.) I think that
Ruby probably has lots of sweet spots and niches, most of which I'm
too unimaginative to think of... and I agree that testing and
development process is definitely one (or several) of them.

I'll add, to respond to the OP's question in the subject: I'm not
confused about "enterprise" software. The only thing that confuses me
is how and why the word "enterprise" came to be a euphemism for
"money-making corporation", when all it really means is "undertaking".
But that ship has sailed (though the word in its current incarnation
is not in my active vocabulary).


David

 

[Sean Mehan]

Kyle,

I agree with much of what you have written and argues, and agree that
there is little about Ruby which should exclude it from this camp of
Enterprise ready.

I would have to disagree about what it means to be Enterprise ready:
To me, as an architect working at making a University infrastructure
work, and to the vast majority of my colleagues, enterprise would mean
things like 1) available to everyone (and able to take the scaling
issues involved in that impl, i.e., it can take all that you have, so
say, for me, 36K users), reliable (and find me a metric for that other
than uptime!-). That's the no argue stuff.

Better Enterprise ready (for me and my ilk!-) would include things like:

interoperable, based on open standards, APIs to integrate, modular in
user AuthN/Z space...

but, again, the real point here is that I don't see anything in there
that would *exclude* ruby apps from that enterprise stack. I feel that
was the important thrust of your post.

best

sean mehan

Really, why are so many people confused about "Enterprise" software,
or what "Enterprise Ruby" would be?

Enterprise software is not in any way, faster, more scalable, more
reliable, or better written than non enterprise software.
People need to get over thinking that that's the way to make it
"Enterprise"

It boils down to a few things: availability of paid support;
availability of _experienced_ contractors; someone else using it
first.

Sean Mehan
Head of Integrated Technologies
Learning and Information Services
UHI - www.uhi.ac.uk
www.weblogs.uhi.ac.uk/sm00sm/