Business software

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, 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 netural 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.