Zdnet Portal Analysis in Reviewing the Zdnet

ZDNet Portal Analysis

In reviewing the ZDNet Review of Software relies on the most basic categorizations of applications and their features, including price, manufacturer, category, software type, operating system requirements, platform distribution media, license pricing and license type. All of these factors are important to anyone looking to evaluate and eventually purchase any kind of software. For the enterprise software buyer, these factors taken together form the basis of how varying software vendors are evaluated for company-wide deployments of applications. The bottom line is that the delineations of software attributes are useful yet there could be greater depth of analysis in the software categories.

Analysis

The organization of software categories is also often called a taxonomy, and includes a hierarchical definition of software based on the dominant enterprise computing and strategy support they meet (Lai, Liu, Lai, Wang, 2010). Application software by definition is the software that runs on a computer that accomplishes specific tasks, from the relatively simple spreadsheet to the very complex tasks of operating entire factories using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems (Jutras, 2008). Enterprise software is specifically used for unifying the many diverse departments in an organization, enabling a greater level of efficiency and performance than would be capable of being accomplished using stand-alone productivity applications (Hakkinen, Hilmola, 2008). Enterprise applications are often orders of magnitude more expensive and difficult to implement compared to personal productivity applications. Enterprise applications often also require a thorough evaluation and series of tests to ensure they will deliver the needed results within an organization, as they often require entire processes to be redefined and redesigned (Russom, 2007). This is the most challenging aspect of enterprise software and defies easy categorization into comparison matrices. Yet the comparisons that ZDNet has created do provide insights into the relative strengths and weaknesses of these applications at an impartial level, devoid of vendor influence. This is very valuable for the buyer of enterprise software applications, as many of the comparisons they receive are heavily slanted to one vendor over another (Lai, Liu, Lai, Wang, 2010). By doing this, they are aspiring to be a trusted advisor in the selection process, which is critical during the evaluation of the largest enterprise systems, with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) being the largest (Hakkinen, Hilmola, 2008).