Anton Pussep

The Impact of Software Business Model Characteristics on Firm Performance

Business models have become a topic of increasing academic interest and have emerged as a unit of analysis for performance studies. The software industry has been the source of major business model innovations and is hence of particular interest to researchers and practitioners. In this paper we collect business model data for 120 public U.S. software firms. While some data can be retrieved from Thomson Reuters database, most variables specific to the software firms are obtained from a tedious expert classification of 10-K and 20-F annual reports. The results show that the business model variables under study significantly impact financial performance, but are hardly reflected in market performance. Thus, they determine firm success, but do not necessarily affect investor decisions. Our cross-disciplinary research is rooted in the fields of strategic management and software business. We contribute by providing insights into business model characteristics and the determinants of software firm performance.

Value Creation and Firm Integration: First Empirical Insights for the Software Industry

The value added created by a firm is a widely used figure. Major elements of a firm’s strategy and business model deal with how the firm creates value and brings it to the customer. This paper focuses on a particular measure which has been broadly applied to measure the degree of vertical integration: value added to sales (VA/S). To our best knowledge, this measure hasn’t been applied in software business research. We hence outline its application in other fields by conducting a broad and structured literature review. First empirical insights are gained by analyzing the VA/S development for 44,171 software firms in the period 2002-2009. These results indicate an increasing degree of vertical integration in the software industry. While practitioners can use the results as a benchmark for their own firms, researchers are provided with a comprehensive literature review, first empirical results on a large sample and avenues for research.

Vom Geschäftsmodell zum Geschäftsprozess und zurück

ZusammenfassungBei der Gestaltung von Geschäftsmodellen (GM) und Geschäftsprozessen (GP) verspricht eine neue integrative Architektur für Assistenzsysteme durchgängige und zielgruppenspezifische Unterstützung. Anwender können mit den vorgeschlagenen Tools und Methoden verschiedene Geschäftsmodelle für die Softwareindustrie konfigurieren und analysieren, die Modelle zu Geschäftsprozessen transformieren und schließlich mit Soll-Ist-Vergleichen die laufende Geschäftstätigkeit kontrollieren. Rückkopplungen von Analysen und Controlling ermöglichen die Bewertung der konfigurierten Modelle und damit eine umgreifende, IT-unterstützte Verzahnung von strategischer und operativer Ebene.