An enterprise application is a business application which is complex, scalable, distributed, component-based, and mission-critical. They may be deployed on various platforms across corporate networks, intranets, or the Internet. They are data-centric, user-friendly, and meet strict requirements for security, administration, and maintenance.

Designing and developing such enterprise applications means satisfying hundreds or thousands of separate requirements. The development decisions you make to satisfy each requirement might affect many other requirements adversely— and the failure to meet any of these requirements can result in the failure of the entire project!

So You need professionals and people with expertise in this field.

The Enterprise Application Model

The Enterprise Application Model is a design tool.

Designing large-scale distributed applications requires a way to simplify complexity. By grouping similar requirements together into a few abstract categories, you can approach them in a more orderly manner. It allows you to break the overall enterprise application development problem into a set of manageable tasks. When you understand the interactions between requirement groups you can tackle them in a systematic manner.

The Enterprise Application Model guides you step by step through the process of designing and building a large-scale commercial application, by organizing the thousands of design requirements into a few sub-models, and showing how they interact. It shows how to maintain balance between the competing requirements of every design decision.

The model is an orderly compilation of all requirements that contribute to implementing every enterprise application, divided into six specific "sub-models." The following table lists these requirements as items to define or deliver within each model.