This article is about software made for business, if you were looking for the business of selling software, see Software business

Software business

This article is about selling software, for information about software made for business: Business software.Software Business is the commercial activity of the software industry, aimed at producing, buying and selling software products or software services...

.

Business software is generally any software program that helps a business increase productivity or measure their productivity. The term covers a large variation of uses within the business environment, and can be categorized by using a small, medium and large matrix:

• The small business market generally consists of home accounting software
  Accounting software
  Accounting software is application software that records and processes accounting transactions within functional modules such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and trial balance. It functions as an accounting information system...
  
  , and office suite
  Office suite
  In computing, an office suite, sometimes called an office software suite or productivity suite is a collection of programs intended to be used by knowledge workers...
  
  s such as OpenOffice.org
  OpenOffice.org
  OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...
  
   or Microsoft Office
  Microsoft Office
  Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
  
  .
• The medium size, or SME, has a broader range of software applications, ranging from accounting, groupware, customer relationship management
  Customer relationship management
  Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...
  
  , human resources software
  Human resource management systems
  A Human Resource Management System or Human Resource Information System , refers to the systems and processes at the intersection between human resource management and information technology...
  
  , outsourcing relationship management
  Outsourcing relationship management
  Outsourcing relationship management is the business discipline widely adopted by companies and public institutions to manage one or more external service providers as part of an outsourcing strategy...
  
  , loan origination software, shopping cart software
  Shopping cart software
  Shopping cart software is software used in e-commerce to assist people making purchases online, analogous to the American English term 'shopping cart'...
  
  , field service software, and other productivity enhancing applications.
• The last segment covers enterprise level software applications, such as those in the fields of enterprise resource planning
  Enterprise resource planning
  Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...
  
  , enterprise content management
  Enterprise content management
  Enterprise Content Management is a formalized means of organizing and storing an organization's documents, and other content, that relate to the organization's processes...
  
   (ECM), business process management
  Business process management
  Business process management is a holistic management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM attempts to...
  
   (BPM) and product lifecycle management
  Product lifecycle management
  In industry, product lifecycle management is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal...
  
  . These applications are extensive in scope, and often come with modules that either add native functions, or incorporate the functionality of third-party software programs.

Now, technologies that have previously only existed in peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 software applications, like Kazaa

Kazaa

Kazaa Media Desktop started as a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks...

 and Napster

Napster

Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...

, are starting to feature within business applications. JXTA

JXTA

JXTA is an open source peer-to-peer protocol specification begun by Sun Microsystems in 2001. The JXTA protocols are defined as a set of XML messages which allow any device connected to a network to exchange messages and collaborate independently of the underlying network topology.As JXTA is based...

 is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 platform

Platform (computing)

A computing platform includes some sort of hardware architecture and a software framework , where the combination allows software, particularly application software, to run...

 that enables the creation of machine and language neutral applications.

Types of business software tools

• Digital Dashboards
  Dashboard (business)
  Dashboard provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators relevant to a particular objective or business process...
  
   - Also known as Business Intelligence Dashboards, Enterprise Dashboards, or Executive Dashboards, these are visually based summaries of business data that show at-a-glance understanding of conditions through metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A very popular BI tool that has arisen in the last few years.
• Online Analytical Processing, commonly known as OLAP
  OLAP
  In computing, online analytical processing, or OLAP , is an approach to swiftly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational reporting and data mining...
  
   (including HOLAP
  HOLAP
  HOLAP is a combination of ROLAP and MOLAP which are other possible implementations of OLAP. HOLAP allows storing part of the data in a MOLAP store and another part of the data in a ROLAP store, allowing a tradeoff of the advantages of each...
  
  , ROLAP
  ROLAP
  ROLAP stands for Relational Online Analytical Processing.ROLAP is an alternative to the MOLAP technology...
  
   and MOLAP
  MOLAP
  MOLAP stands for Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing.MOLAP is an alternative to the ROLAP technology...
  
  ) - a capability of some management, decision support, and executive information systems that supports interactive examination of large amounts of data from many perspectives.
• Reporting software generates aggregated views of data to keep the management informed about the state of their business.
• Data mining
  Data mining
  Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...
  
   - extraction of consumer information from a database by utilizing software that can isolate and identify previously unknown patterns or trends in large amounts of data. There are a variety of data mining techniques that reveal different types of patterns. Some of the techniques that belong here are Statistical methods
  Statistics
  Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
  
   (particularly Business statistics
  Business statistics
  Business statistics is the science of good decision making in the face of uncertainty and is used in many disciplines such as financial analysis, econometrics, auditing, production and operations including services improvement, and marketing research....
  
  ) and Neural network
  Neural network
  The term neural network was traditionally used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. The modern usage of the term often refers to artificial neural networks, which are composed of artificial neurons or nodes...
  
  s as very advanced means of analysing data.
• Business performance management
  Business performance management
  Business performance management is a set of management and analytic processes that enable the management of an organization's performance to achieve one or more pre-selected goals...
  
   (BPM)

A Brief History of Business Software

The essential motivation for business software is to increase profits by cutting costs or speeding the productive cycle. In the earliest days of white-collar

White-collar worker

The term white-collar worker refers to a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work, in contrast with a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor...

 business automation

Automation

Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization...

, large mainframe computer

Mainframe computer

Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...

s were used to tackle the most tedious jobs, like bank cheque clearing and factory accounting.

Factory accounting software was among the most popular of early business software tools, and included the automation of General Ledger

Ledger

A ledger is the principal book or computer file for recording and totaling monetary transactions by account, with debits and credits in separate columns and a beginning balance and ending balance for each account. The ledger is a permanent summary of all amounts entered in supporting journals which...

s, Fixed Assets Inventory ledgers, Cost Accounting ledgers, Accounts Receivable ledgers, and Accounts Payable ledgers (including Payroll, Life Insurance, Health Insurance, Federal and State Insurance and Retirement) ledgers.

The early use of software to replace manual white-collar labor was extremely profitable, and caused a radical shift in white-collar labor. One computer might easily replace 100 white-collar 'pencil pushers', and the computer would not require any Health or Retirement Benefits.

Building on these early successes with IBM, Hewlett-Packard and other early suppliers of business software solutions, corporate consumers demanded business software to replace the old-fashioned drafting board. CAD-CAM software (or computer-aided drafting for computer-aided manufacturing

Computer-aided manufacturing

Computer-aided manufacturing is the use of computer software to control machine tools and related machinery in the manufacturing of workpieces. This is not the only definition for CAM, but it is the most common; CAM may also refer to the use of a computer to assist in all operations of a...

) arrived in the early 1980s. Also, project management software

Project management software

Project management software is a term covering many types of software, including estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, quality management and documentation or administration systems, which are used to...

 was so valued in the early 1980s that it might cost as much as $500,000 per copy (although such software typically had far fewer capabilities than modern project management software such as Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a project management software program, developed and sold by Microsoft, which is designed to assist a project manager in developing a plan, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing the budget, and analyzing workloads.The application creates critical path...

, which one might purchase today for under $500 per copy.)

In the early days, perhaps the most noticeable, widespread change in business software was the Word Processor. Because of its rapid rise, the ubiquitous IBM typewriter suddenly vanished in the 1980s as millions of companies worldwide shifted to the use of Word Perfect business software, and later, Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...

 software. Another vastly popular software program for business were mathematical spreadsheet program such as Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus 1-2-3 is a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software . It was the IBM PC's first "killer application"; its huge popularity in the mid-1980s contributed significantly to the success of the IBM PC in the corporate environment.-Beginnings:...

, and later Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

.

In the 1990s business shifted massively towards globalism with the appearance of SAP

SAP AG

SAP AG is a German software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software...

 software which coordinates a supply-chain of vendors, potentially worldwide, for the most efficient, streamlined operation of factory manufacture.

Yet nothing in the history of business software has had the global impact of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

, with its Email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 and Websites that now serve commercial interests worldwide. Globalism

Globalism

Globalism can have at least two different and opposing meanings. One meaning is the attitude or policy of placing the interests of the entire world above those of individual nations...

 in business fully arrived when the Internet became a household word.

See also

• Accounting software
  Accounting software
  Accounting software is application software that records and processes accounting transactions within functional modules such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and trial balance. It functions as an accounting information system...
  
  
• Construction software
• Customer relationship management
  Customer relationship management
  Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...
  
  
• Decision making software
  Decision making software
  Decision-making software is a term integrating decision analysis tools to facilitate a person's decision-making process, which results in a choice of a course of action or a variant among several alternatives...
  
  
• Dashboard (business)
  Dashboard (business)
  Dashboard provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators relevant to a particular objective or business process...
  
  
• Document Automation/Assembly
  Document automation
  Document automation is the design of systems and workflow that assist in the creation of electronic documents. These include logic based systems that use segments of pre-existing text and/or data to assemble a new document. This process is increasingly used within certain industries to assemble...
  
  
• Document Management Software
  Document management system
  A document management system is a computer system used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. It is usually also capable of keeping track of the different versions created by different users . The term has some overlap with the concepts of content management...
  
  
• Electronic business
  Electronic business
  Electronic business, commonly referred to as "eBusiness" or "e-business", or an internet business, may be defined as the application of information and communication technologies in support of all the activities of business...
  
  
• Electronic performance support systems
  Electronic performance support systems
  An Electronic Performance Support System is any computer software program or component that improves user performance.Electronic Performance Support Systems is also the name of a book, published in 1991, by Gloria Gery.- Uses :...
  
  
• ERP software
• Inventory software
• Legal Matter Management
  Legal Matter Management
  Legal Matter Management or Matter Management refers to activities involved in managing all aspects of the corporate legal practice . Matter Management is distinguished from Case Management, in that Case Management is generally considered to refer to law firm related activities...
  
  
• Management information systems
• Operational risk management
  Operational risk management
  The term Operational Risk Management is defined as a continual cyclic process which includes risk assessment, risk decision making, and implementation of risk controls, which results in acceptance, mitigation, or avoidance of risk...
  
  
• Product lifecycle management
  Product lifecycle management
  In industry, product lifecycle management is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal...
  
  
• Project management software
  Project management software
  Project management software is a term covering many types of software, including estimation and planning, scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, quality management and documentation or administration systems, which are used to...
  
  
• Retail Management Systems
• Retail software
  Retail software
  Retail software is computer software sold to end consumers, usually under restricted licenses. Until the emergence of the Internet, retail software represented, until the 2000s, the vast majority of all end consumer software used and was referred to as shrinkware because software almost always...
  
  
• Supply chain management
  Supply chain management
  Supply chain management is the management of a network of interconnected businesses involved in the ultimate provision of product and service packages required by end customers...