INTRODUCTION
Software is an integral part of our personal lives, business activities, and government services. The majority of the ten largest publicly-traded companies by market cap are either software companies or businesses where software is integral to their operations and products. Heading the list is Apple and Microsoft, each at over $3 trillion in market cap as of the time of our research and writing. Many of the top fifty companies by market cap are either software companies or enabled by software technologies; for example, Oracle is valued at over $383 billion, SAP at over $249 billion, and Netflix at over $270 billion.
Revenues in the software industry are estimated to be approximately $700 billion dollars in 2024 and are expected to grow by over 5 percent annually going forward (Statista, 2024). By way of contrast, total revenues for all US Colleges and Universities in 2023 was under $560 billion and given trends from 2018 through 2023 is likely to decline in 2024 (IBIS World, 2024). We can only expect, moreover, that software will continue to grow more important in our lives with the greater use of artificial intelligence, crypto, and more powerful applications, for example, personalized medicine.
SAAS
A primary factor in the growth in the enterprise software industry is software-as-a-service, commonly known as SaaS. During the past several years software companies and their customers – enterprises and governments have dramatically shifted to SaaS as the primary way to access and use software. An important driver of this shift and, accordingly, a key factor in the growth of the software industry, is several technology and business innovations enabled by SaaS (Cusumano, 2010; Miranda, 2015). These innovations have enabled significant increases in the number of software companies, a faster pace in the functionality of software and an increase in the types of software applications available to individuals, enterprises, and government agencies (Ansley, 2018).
