Business software is generally any software program that helps a business increase productivity or measure their productivity. The term covers a large variation of uses within the business environment, and can be categorized by using a small, medium and large matrix:

• The small business market generally consists of home accounting software, and office suites such as Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.
• The medium size, or SME, has a broader range of software applications, ranging from accounting, groupware, customer relationship management, human resources software, outsourcing relationship management, loan origination software, shopping cart software, field service software, and other productivity enhancing applications.
• The last segment covers enterprise level software applications, such as those in the fields of enterprise resource planning, enterprise content management (ECM), business process management and product lifecycle management. These applications are extensive in scope, and often come with modules that either add native functions, or incorporate the functionality of third-party software programs.

Now, technologies that have previously only existed in peer-to-peer software applications, like Kazaa and Napster, are starting to feature within business applications. JXTA is an open source platform that enables the creation of machine and language neutral applications. Peer based applications will be especially useful for aggregating the information at the edge of the network that currently resides in the neurons of the users themselves.

Types of business software tools

• Digital Dashboards - Also known as Business Intelligence Dashboards, Enterprise Dashboards, or Executive Dashboards, these are visually-based summaries of business data that show at-a-glance understanding of business conditions through metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A very popular BI tool that has arisen in the last few years.
• Online Analytical Processing, commonly known as OLAP (including HOLAP, ROLAP and MOLAP)- a capability of some management, decision support, and executive information systems that supports interactive examination of large amounts of data from many perspectives.
• Reporting software generates aggregated views of data to keep the management informed about the state of their business.
• Data mining - extraction of consumer information from a database by utilizing software that can isolate and identify previously unknown patterns or trends in large amounts of data. There are a variety of data mining techniques that reveal different types of patterns.. Some of the techniques that belong here are Statistical methods (particularly Business statistics) and Neural networks as very advanced means of analysing data.
• Business performance management (BPM)