The Reliability of Enterprise Applications

"Enterprises sometimes base their buying decisions only on the required business functionality, however, and tend to overlook the application's overall reliability."

Only sometimes?

As someone that has worked in that field for around 25 years, that's a very generous phrasing. I think another way to look at it is that the soft costs that accrue over time and are the result of technical issues are often times just invisible or under appreciated by those most involved in making decisions (certainly at the low end) and by the dynamics of the system selection consulting engagements at the middle and (perhaps) higher end.

Also, its fairly frequent that the people in the enterprise technology department, the people that should really help to navigate these issues, suffer a couple problems themselves. One they tend to be defensive, overly demanding on these counts, and simply seen as a roadblock... conversely you also find IT management far under-qualified to participate in this, too. Sure there are many very really solid professionals out there... but I think it's only "sometimes" you find the right coincidence of business and technical understanding of the full picture, including longer term cost of ownership.

[ADDITION] Of course, it's not just poor hapless enterprisey/businessey types that sometimes have problems with the long game in technology.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21782156 I think is the same basic message and hits the nail on the head in principle.