Third Parties’ Influence on Sales in the Enterprise Software Market

The enterprise software industry faces dynamic market environments. Customers are unpredictable, and many different factors influence a sale. Software as such is frequently perceived as being a sort of 'black box'. In this paper we examine the different factors that influence new product adoption and diffusion in the enterprise software market, where we especially look at the role of third parties, such as consultancy firms and industry analysts. We decided to focus on the latter for two reasons. First, the author has been employed with an enterprise software vendor for some time, where he observed the important role analysts and consultants have in sales cycles. Second, we could not find any previous scientific studies addressing the role of third parties in enterprise software sales, i.e. in relation to the topic of 'brand choice'. Understanding sales drivers for enterprise software is not only interesting for Academia. It has a large value for enterprise software vendors; many of them have lost momentum since the industry downturn in the year 2000 (Prasad, 2002). Understanding the path to success can be valuable: it is in the proper combination of product-functionalities, and marketing. Part of the marketing might be the relation with third parties. This paper starts with a literature review of the software industry, and focuses especially on enterprise software. Than we review some literature on new product introductions and describe previous research on new (enterprise) software introductions. An analysis shows the importance of third parties, which brings us to some concrete research questions that lead to recommendations for further research. 2. The software industry Today, computers are everywhere in society; as a result the software industry has become a fairly large business. Software is everywhere. It runs on the computers each consumer and professional user has, and it is integrated in almost each of the day-today products we use; reaching from cars to microwave ovens. In the early years (the 1960s and 1970s), computers – and therefore software – were only used for administrative purposes within large enterprises. The introduction of PC's in the 1980s unleashed a whole different wave of