In this chapter, we want to describe an actual company, enhansiv, where the engineering organization has made the transition from supporting a conventional business model with a traditional approach to computing, to an approach more consistent with an Internet company. One of the authors assisted this company throughout its transition and is able to provide the kind of details that only someone intimately involved in the entire process can offer. We could have chosen a large company, with multiple divisions and several different engineering groups, but the details would soon have become overwhelming. Enhansiv is a good example, both because it successfully demonstrates the concepts we have been discussing throughout this book, and because the company is small enough to assure that the reader can understand exactly what happened. Most importantly, enhansiv is proud of what it has accomplished and is willing to allow others to read about its struggle to reengineer itself.

Most companies have only recently begun to consider the changes they will need to make to their core information systems in order to successfully deploy major applications on the Internet. This is just as true of software vendors as it is of companies selling more conventional products. Many software vendors, like the majority of their clients, are saddled with a large base of legacy code much of it proprietary that is hard to retrofit. Many are reluctant to create new products that will compete with their existing products.

Fortunately, that's not a problem at enhansiv