Business Software
When humans learned to harness the power of manipulating 1s and 0s, softwares have significantly become a part of every day life. In fact, software has helped trigger some of the biggest twists in human history. Who would have thought that man could end up walking in the surface of the moon sooner than what was expected? Who would have imagined that an apocalyptic weapon like H-bomb and nuke could trigger a massive political hysteria? And who would have considered that Pluto, once taught by grade school teachers before as the ninth planet, is no longer part of the Solar System?
Nobody would have ever realized all these events, if not to great minds and of course to tools that made calculations of vast data possible, faster. Software – an indispensable tool for the scientific community, for government and politics, for savings lives and of course for running the business world.
During the last half century of the business world, no other tool has ever topped the significance and usefulness of business software. Business software is technically defined as any program that facilitates the day to day activities of a business organization with the aim of increasing productivity, measuring productivity, augmenting the bottom line while reducing costs. Business software has a wide spectrum and covers every aspect of business operation. Therefore, software for business is categorized into three: large, medium and small matrices.
The small matrix covers business software solutions for basic home accounting and office packages such as OpenOffice and Microsoft Office. Software tools for medium sized business, often referred to as SMEs cover those requirements that cover accounting, customer service management, groupware, human resources software, short cart service, loan facilitation, field service and productivity assistance applications. Large matrix of business software solutions include those high end applications that cover broader needs like ERP or enterprise resource planning, ECM or enterprise content management, PLM or product life cycle management and business process management. Large matrix software packages are the most costly and comprehensive usually custom designed to fit the needs of large corporations or may be incorporated with third party applications.
Newer software technologies have also become part of the business world, although intended primarily for use of the general public. P2P or peer to peer applications, such as, Kazaa and Bit Torrent have become a common tool for sharing and sending soft copies of documents. Even the transmission from soft to hard copy documents has become possible with the use of fax software like eFax. Business version of a popular audio-P2P program Napster has now been made possible for corporate consumption.
The most widely used of the three matrices are the small matrix business software packages. Microsoft Office Suite, in particular, tops global use, although a free open source software OpenOffice.org has been developed to support different file formats and platforms like Linux, Mac OSX, OpenVMS, Solaris, FreeBSD and even Windows. Apple has also developed its own set of office tools called iWork for its Mac OSX and Mac computers.
Microsoft’s Office Suite, OpenOffice.org and Apple’s iWork are currently among the top office packages. Office tools like word processor, spreadsheet maker and presentation design are typical of these enterprise business software brands. Microsoft calls its word processor MS Word, Apple calls it Pages, while OpenOffice.org has the Writer. The spreadsheet tool for Windows is Excel, Numbers from iWork and Calc from OpenOffice.org. PowerPoint is the presentation from the Office Suite, Keynote is from iWork and Impress is from OpenOffice.org.
Other less popular office business software suites are WordPerfect from Corel, MarinerPak, KOffice, GNOME Office and Lotus SmartSuite of IBM. Although office suites only do the basic office works, business softwares like these prove only that softwares have definitely shaped the way the business world moves. To put it, business software is no longer an expense but a component of business.