Three Major Components of Enterprise Computing

Enterprise computing is a complete package of information technology for an enterprise or an organization. It is capable of doing all the information technology (IT) related operations of the organization. Enterprise computing on a whole contains three major components. They are enterprise software, enterprise database and enterprise networking. We will discuss them briefly in this article.

Enterprise software
Enterprise software is the most important component of all three because it is one that performs major functions crucial to the operations of the business. There are many subsystems within enterprise software. The four major subsystems of enterprise software are:

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) – It is a combination of various software modules. ERP coordinates among all parts of enterprise software, and helps organization in performing operations quickly and efficiently.
• Supply chain management (SCM) – SCM is responsible for producing, storing and supplying the products. It keeps track of inventory and flow of products from organization to customers.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) – CRM describes business and customer relationship. It helps businesses get new customers and retains old customers.
• Business intelligence (BI) – It is a method of organizing raw data to meaningful form and studying the past and present, and predicting future of the business.

Enterprise database

• Organization may contain huge amount of data including sharable data, confidential data, resources and business logic.
• Enterprise data is divided into internal (used within organization) and external (used outside the business also) categories of data based on organizational requirements.
• Enterprise database is critical part of an enterprise. Therefore, it should be maintained well.
• Enterprise data should have following characteristics:
• Scalable – Enterprise data must be flexible and scalable to facilitate frequent changes and requirements that occur in an organization.
• Secured – As enterprise data include critical information, they should be managed through authorized and controlled access.
• Quality – Enterprise data has to follow organizational standards. Enterprise data should be free from error, and there should not be duplication of data.
• Integrated – Enterprise data must be same and consistent across users and systems who use it.

Enterprise network

• Enterprise networking is the backbone of an organization. It connects all the computers and other devices irrespective of their environment across the organization and outside the organization (if required).
• Enterprise network may consists of computers with different operating systems, other electronic devices like printers, scanners, mainframe systems, smartphones, tablets, etc.
• It enables communication among devices, and makes it easier for them to share information, resources and retrieve required information that is on the server or on other enterprise computer.
• Enterprise network increases the performance of the business by enabling communication among all the systems and provides security to them.
• It also eliminates the unwanted, inactive or isolated users in the network.
• Enterprise network sometimes may be a group of LANs (local area networks) or WANs (Wide area networks) depending on the requirements of an organization.

These are the three important components of the enterprise computing. They should be maintained well for proper functioning and growth of the business/enterprise.