The term 'enterprise software' has been unscrupulously abused by marketeers to sell software and even hardware in the manner already suggested by others. A proper use of the term 'enterprise' as distinct from 'organisation' is that in this context it includes and requires interfaces with other organisations. A typical example of enterprise software would be the software driving a wholesaler's website where retailing customers can place orders, download invoices and review their account.

The term 'enterprise software' was first coined in the 1980's before the internet as such but after a sudden increase in the occurrence of companies doing business with each other by connecting their computers together by some means or another. The first enterprise system I worked on, in 1983, used Teletex at the client end and a teletex server running on VMS at the manufacturer's end as the means by which users in a car dealership could locate and order stock from the manufacturer, distributors or even other dealers. Unlike teletext, the user filled out unprotected fields on the TV screen using a keyboard which were passed on to VAX FORTRAN programs which would convert them into database queries (including write transactions) and then reconstruct the page on the remote user's TV screen based on the results of the DBMS query.

In that sense such a Teletex system could be called an early example of enterprise software, which is today replaced by its website-based equivalents.