This article is about selling software, for information about software made for business: Business software

Business software

This article is about software made for business, if you were looking for the business of selling software, see Software business.Business software is generally any software program that helps a business increase productivity or measure their productivity...

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Software Business is the commercial activity of the software industry

Software industry

The software industry includes businesses involved in the development, maintenance and publication of computer software using any business model...

, aimed at producing, buying and selling software products

Software product lines

Software product lines, or software product line development, refers to software engineering methods, tools and techniques for creating a collection of similar software systems from a shared set of software assets using a common means of production....

 or software services. The business of software differs from other businesses, in that its main good is intangible and fixed costs of production are high while variable costs of production are close to zero.

Types of software businesses

Cusumano and Nambisan divide software companies (supplier-side) into service and product companies according to how they conduct business. Popp and Meyer give a more detailed analysis of different types of business models of software companies.

Software product business

In the Software product business, Software is licensed for installation and execution on a user- or customer-supplied infrastructure. In the software product business, revenues typically originate from selling software upgrades to the customer.

Software service business

Software services business is a strategy of a software company whose offering consists mainly of services or consulting relating to software development.

Characteristics of software services business

Generally business model of a software company can be categorized as product company, services company of a hybrid between these two models . Software service business can also refer to offering Software as a Service

Software as a Service

Software as a service , sometimes referred to as "on-demand software," is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are typically accessed by users using a thin client, normally using a web browser over the Internet.SaaS has become a common...

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Software services business can be categorized into following categories:

• Companies that provide consultation services related to software business
• Companies that provide software development services as a subcontractor.

Service Operations

Characteristics of Service Operations that are relevant to software services industry:

• Intangibility: Service is produced instead of tangible product. Therefore service innovations can be easily copied by competitors.
• Perishability: Human resource intensive services cannot be produced in advance, therefore demand and supply is difficult to manage. This also affects business scalability.
• Heterogeneity: Service encounters are unique and customer needs vary, therefore software services are difficult to standardize and productize. Therefore service business is also difficult to scale.

Software Business Organizations

• The Software business community
  Software business community
  The software business community is a non-profit community web site that aims to promote the cooperation of researchers, managers, practitioners and end-users in the software business...
  
  ( SWBC) http://swbcommunity.org
• The Finnish software business cluster
• The Business Online