My experience buying enterprise software (an ecommerce platform):
1. Support? Don't make me laugh. Maybe once you've delivered to them a paper trail 2 miles long proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that your installation is compliant with their recommendations, you might get through to a low level guy who will give you advice like: "That's a lot of products, can you reduce the number of products you sell on your site"?
2. Ease of use? Installation of this software was a total nightmare. It basically only operated in 2 modes. 1) The wizard/demo mode which could not be used for production. 2) Find a consultant with the magic set of ancient ant build scripts to pass around.
3. Scaling? Theoretically built in, in practice just as difficult as scaling any other framework. It only requires you get the above consultant to talk to another consultant to get the super secret scripts which jump past the orm and hit the database (which by the way isn't supported by the product anyways).
4. Most features were either implemented just far enough to convince CTO's there was a check in that feature box or were so "generic", that all you had to do was "write a class which implements the feature" and plug it in. For this (the privilege of being able to inject code using their home-grown dependency injection system), we payed through the nose.
5. Backup/Restore? Literally a f!@#! unsolved problem. Required a pretty much simultaneous snapshot of the filesystem of every app server as well as all the databases.
After several months I became convinced that the only reason this super expensive platform existed was to provide jobs for consultants.
Then I (briefly) became one before joining a startup.
1. Support? Don't make me laugh. Maybe once you've delivered to them a paper trail 2 miles long proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that your installation is compliant with their recommendations, you might get through to a low level guy who will give you advice like: "That's a lot of products, can you reduce the number of products you sell on your site"?
2. Ease of use? Installation of this software was a total nightmare. It basically only operated in 2 modes. 1) The wizard/demo mode which could not be used for production. 2) Find a consultant with the magic set of ancient ant build scripts to pass around.
3. Scaling? Theoretically built in, in practice just as difficult as scaling any other framework. It only requires you get the above consultant to talk to another consultant to get the super secret scripts which jump past the orm and hit the database (which by the way isn't supported by the product anyways).
4. Most features were either implemented just far enough to convince CTO's there was a check in that feature box or were so "generic", that all you had to do was "write a class which implements the feature" and plug it in. For this (the privilege of being able to inject code using their home-grown dependency injection system), we payed through the nose.
5. Backup/Restore? Literally a f!@#! unsolved problem. Required a pretty much simultaneous snapshot of the filesystem of every app server as well as all the databases.
After several months I became convinced that the only reason this super expensive platform existed was to provide jobs for consultants. Then I (briefly) became one before joining a startup.