Adjusting the Categories

A few additional thoughts on how the categories are organized:

• It may make sense to analyze the enterprise software vendors based on the business processes they cover. These processes could include product design, inbound logistics, manufacturing, outbound logistics, sales and marketing, procurement, HR, planning, finance and accounting. Smaller enterprise software vendors might offer a product line that covers only one or a few processes, whereas the large vendors (SAP and Oracle) would offer a far more complete suite.
  
  
• If we do analyze the enterprise software vendors based on business processes, then it might make sense to classify the engineering and design software companies within this framework, perhaps as Product Lifecycle Management applications supporting the product design process.
  
  
• The two largest "Other" companies in the previous post are VMware and Adobe. VMware would almost certainly belong in the Infrastructure Software category. Adobe is a bit harder to classify; perhaps it will make more sense to think of Adobe as a portfolio of businesses that spans several categories.