Customer relationships and the small software firm

Alajoutsijärvi, Kimmo; Mannermaa, Kari; Tikkanen, Henrikki

doi:10.1016/s0378-7206(99)00039-7

Cited by 52 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Hence, studying software firms as a homogeneous group may well produce confusing results, depending on the distribution of software product and software service firms in the sample. Secondly, it seems that cultural or geographical issues such as communication and collaboration with foreign customers [4,9,12,26] maintenance of services [34], and location close to customers [12,33,34] may not inhibit software service firms' internationalization to the extent envisaged in previous literature.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…40]. Thus, software service firms which operate in B2B markets and which develop consultancy solutions for narrow customer segments [8,9,12] can use their industry-specific knowledge -knowledge that is by no means country-specific, and which can be applied to a number of foreign markets. This finding is in line with the study by Sharma and Johanson [41], who investigated firms in the technical consultancy sector.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Along similar lines, Bell [24] found that frequent customer visits were required for software providers, because software frequently requires installation, customization, training, maintenance, and back-up services. Because software service providers collaborate with customers more frequently [9,11,12,33], one can expect geographical distance to be a correspondingly powerful inhibitor for their internationalization. This leads us to the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 2: Compared to software firms that rely on product sales, software firms that rely more on service sales will tend to internationalize to geographically more proximate markets.…”

Section: Software Customization and The Impact Of Geographical Distanmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the literature on IB, software firms have been commonly categorized under the service sector, since they produce immaterial products, and closely allied services [11]. However, several works in the field of IS [7,9,12,42] have indicated that software product firms and software service firms differ in several respects. For instance, the degree of productization appears to be inversely related to the amount of services needed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, software product firms have to be able to capture generic product knowledge, so that the product can be developed for various customer segments [9]. Alajoutsijärvi et al [12] concluded that service-oriented software firms tend to operate in familiar domestic markets, whereas software product firms target distant, international markets.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Contrasting Internationalization Paths of Product- and Service-oriented Software Firms

Ojala¹,

Rönkkö²,

Peltonen³

2019

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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The internationalization of software firms has been widely researched topic over the last two decades. However, the most of the studies have treated software firms as a homogeneous group, ignoring the fact that software firms actually differ greatly in terms of having either a product or a service orientation. Based on earlier literature, we hypothesized that software product firms would show a tendency to internationalize earlier and at a smaller size than software service firms, and that product firms would show a greater tendency to target countries that are both geographically and culturally distant. In fact, we found no support for most of our hypotheses, with relatively strong and statistically significant results emerging in the opposite direction. We offer several explanations for these counterintuitive findings.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Software Customization and The Impact Of Geographical Distanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Contrasting Internationalization Paths of Product- and Service-oriented Software Firms

Ojala¹,

Rönkkö²,

Peltonen³

2019

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Entry barriers of small and medium‐sized software firms in the Japanese market

Ojala

Tyrväinen

2007

Thunderbird Intl Bus Rev

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The Japanese software market size was U.S. $131,773 million in 2004. Due to limited domestic software production, Japan is highly dependent on imported software products. Despite the market potential for foreign software firms in Japan, almost no research exists on what kind of challenges foreign software firms encounter when they are entering the market. To fill this gap, this article investigates the entry barriers of small and medium‐sized software firms in the Japanese market by using a multicase study. The findings suggest that most of the barriers are firm‐specific and mainly related to firms' resources and capabilities to operate in the market. The entry barriers encountered also seem to differ somewhat from earlier investigations, which have mainly targeted large manufacturing firms. The new observations included common barriers related to the intensive information flow of customization and localization needs and market requirements of software products. The findings are useful for both practice and further research. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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