Business Models for Enterprise Software Vendors

In the highly competitive economy trends that IT market is living, the OpenSource Software(OSS) has finally started to gain adherence in the Enterprise customers' market, due to the fact of being no longer an infra-structure layer offer, but also an application layer offer. The appearance of a second generation of OSS software companies, in the mid of the first decade of the 21st century, has made possible to OSS compete directly with the proprietary and traditional software giants(Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, etc). This new set of OSS companies started to deliver real added valuefor the Enterprise customers in their core IT business solutions, providing consistent and scalable offers on CRMs, ERPs, Document Management Systems, and other software applications.This research work describes, identifies and analyzes a set of major OSS Vendors that have built their software under the new paradigm of the commercial open source, describes the typical hybrid business models types that they are supported on, and identifies the different and common variables that can differentiate each business models.