A Study Of Product Variety Strategy For Business Software

Variety management, which is not only involved in the software development but also the pricing and delivery strategies, has emerged as a crucial dimension of successful business practice for business-software suppliers. Through providing various products, heterogeneous user preferences could be maximally met and efficient product and marketing strategy will be made, and all of these may lead to the maximization of the companies' long profit. In this paper, I will stand in the supplier's perspective; take the business software characteristics into consideration to study why a business software company chooses to make the variety strategy and how to implement it. And I hope it will be useful in guiding the business software companies' management practice.Through systematic analysis on the known variety researches, based on the conclusion of the business software characteristics, the thesis firstly builds a business software variety interaction mechanism frame, systematically describes the relationship between the business software characteristics and the variety strategy, including the motivation of the business software variety, the influencing factors' analysis and the profit-cost/risks analysis on the business software variety. And then the thesis studies how the software companies to conduct the variety strategy, which includes the variety-creation strategy and the variety-implement strategy. For the variety-creation part, we study in the dimension, the quantity and the timing of the business software variety; and in the later part, we analyze how the companies to implement the variety management by the product architecture, delivery and marketing paths. At last, through the UFIDA Software Co.,Ltd.'case study, we confirm the model and raise some advice for the business software companies.