Building software imposes a set of general challenges, which are complemented by those specific to the business context. The use of declarative programming as key implementation technology provides several advantages in both areas, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by companies of all sizes and domains. In particular, the functional programming language Erlang is getting big momentum in the last years thanks to its built-in capabilities for high availability, robustness, maintainability. This presentation shows some practical examples and discusses the role that the implementation technology (Erlang) played in their successful outcome.