If there are two words that strike terror into my heart it’s Enterprise Software. There’s a conception that somehow big, important companies must only want to work with big, sprawling, monolithic software ‘solutions’, rather than focusing and tools and technologies that get the job done.

As soon as you step into the enterprise software arena you enter a new world of language and terminology, as each company tries to make out they have somehow reinvented the wheel. So for instance Salesforce have now hit upon “Software as a Service” ™ “the world’s first multitenant ondemand service”, or what you or I might call a web application. Everywhere in this sector, acronyms like SaaS, SOA and ASP abound.

As respected designer and writer Khoi Vinh rightly identifies, enterprise software doesn’t get criticised to the extent of a $30 piece of shareware:

“Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users. Given that hothouse environment, it’s only natural that the result is often very strange.”

I think another reason why enterprise software lacks critical evaluation is that people are unwilling to risk dumping on something they or their company must have spent many thousands of dollars on. The Emperor’s New Clothes are always in fashion in the Software Enterprise. Companies become bogged down in IT-led infrastructure projects, where innovation and flexibility are but distant constellations.

If the Web 2.0 revolution has taught us anything, it’s that genuine innovation comes from the bottom up, in creating small and nimble applications that do a few things really well, rather than trying to do everything.

We’re constantly striving to add flexibility and at the same time simplify. Stripping away all that is unnecessary to leave only that which is essential is tough in this era of feature-creep, but one that ultimately leads to better products that work better.

Flexibility and adaptability, a loose-fit approach, allows small developers like ourselves, to meet the needs of our clients with a little imagination, rather than creating an enormously complex, narrow-focused systems that cannot adapt to changing client requirements.

The Monday after the first weekend of December has been dubbed Mega Monday. It’s been identified as the busiest day of online sales of the year. This year, according to The Times, the online tills will ring to the tune of £5 billion, with total online sales for December 2007 estimated at £15 billion.

“Monday is the traditional big day for online shopping because buyers usually turn to the internet after having failed to find what they wanted in shops at the weekend. They also go online to see if they can find a better deal on an item seen in a shop.”

As an online incentive company, we see a similar pattern to e-commerce sites. Users of our iD-points products are redeeming points faster than ever – this week will see more points redeemed than any other week in our history.

Meanwhile this video news article on the BBC shows that some people still like going to the shops. “It’s all about the shopping experience”, claims a John Lews spokesman. But online shopping is now firmly established as an alternative to those for whom battling the madding crowds down the high street is not a positive user experience.

Online incentive solutions are to vouchers as e-commerce is to high street shopping. And the growth of web-based incentive schemes is set to follow the growth of online shopping.