Apologies if what I am going to ask is too generic and please feel free to mark it as community wiki or even close it but after getting a good answer please.. Here goes nothing.

I had a heated debate over the term application infrastructure with a consultant from a BIG company and hence I am here to see what the experts think as I myself need a good understanding as well. I am a puny software developer and was trying to have a chat about software architecture and stuff and then we kinda got stuck up at the term application infrastructure.

As per my rival's understanding, this is solely used re the back-end hardware components and whereas I thought he is mixing the contexts and from the context of software eng it should refer to stuff that supports the application such as logging, ORM, or even framework (.net) etc.

To what extent am I wrong and if I am please shed some light on the definition...it's really gonna help a lot.

Thanks