Academic work on agents and ontologies is often oblivious to the complexities and realities of enterprise computing. At the same time, the practitioners of enterprise computing, although they are adept at the building of robust, real-life enterprise applications, are unaware of the academic body of work and the opportunities of applying novel approaches of academic origin. Enterprise applications are very complex systems that are designed to support critical business operations. This article outlines the technical and business foundations of enterprise application software and briefly discusses viable opportunities for agents and ontology research.