Everyone is in the software business You may not know it, but you are in the software business, no matter what your actual business may appear to be. It doesn’t matter what you produce, whether you are a “bricks and mortar” retailer or a “guys in trucks” distributor, software is where you are going to end up.

Why is everyone in the software business? Simply because software is become the lifeblood of so many decisions on what a business makes, how it is sold, and how customers are kept happy. All the interesting business operations are happening inside your company’s software. Software is where you can find out if your customers are going elsewhere, if your profits are coming from some new markets, and if your employees are helping or hurting your overall reputation.

As an example, the airline Virgin America has billions of dollars invested in planes and the people that fly them, but their brand lives and thrives based on their mobile and web experience. That experience is all because of the airline’s booking software, and understanding what is happening with that software will make the difference between success and failure for the airline.

Take as another example a national food service distributor. Their business is getting food into trucks, and then getting those trucks to restaurants and other institutional caterers and retail kitchens. The company has had an ecommerce business for the past decade, and a pretty significant one at that. But lately their customers have been shifting their emphasis from calling their sales representatives with the weekly orders and wanting to do more online. The distributor needed to scale up their online business, and also be more data-driven. Rather than letting their truck drivers or regional offices make decisions about distribution, they wanted a single view of their business, and use the changes in their orders and other data to fine-tune their deliveries. This food distributor is now firmly into the software business.

What is driving everyone to software? Several things.

• The cloud. The days where you had to build your own servers and data centers are over. Post Holdings is probably the largest cloud-only company, and their revenues are in the billions.
• Everyone wants an online storefront. Just like the food distributor, even the most basic industries are finding out there is value is selling their stuff online.
• Big Data is getting more familiar. You can now find Hadoop clusters in many traditional Fortune 500 companies. The IT staffers at the giant retailer Sears eventually spun off a side business in helping others get started with Big Data.
•  Customer experience is king. One way that businesses can differentiate themselves is by paying attention to their customers. This isn’t anything new: Nordstrom’s department stores have been doing this for decades. What is new is a range of software tools to help figure this stuff out.

I will have more to say about this topic, right now I am working on a white paper for a client that will dive into this deeper. Check back here in the fall when I can post a link to it.