Modeling of product software businesses: Investigation into industry product and channel typologies

www.cs.uu.nl/groups/OI Abstract. The product software industry lacks a method for describing their products and business models on a high abstraction level. The lack of good methods to model a software product makes it harder to evaluate a business model especially for people with less know-ledge of software architectures and more knowledge about the business side of creating soft-ware. This paper presents a model consisting of two diagrams the Product Context Diagram (PCD) which describes the context in which a software product operates and the Software Supply Network (SSN) diagram which describes the different parties involved in the delivery and deployment of a software product or service. Furthermore this paper presents a typology for both diagrams. The proposed diagrams are simple and easy to create therefore providing a quick insight to the core of a business model, creating the diagrams supports the process of evaluating the business model.