Benchmarking the customer configuration updating practices of product software vendors

Product software vendors do not invest enough effort on release, delivery, deployment, and usage and activation of their software products. Not spending effort on these customer configuration updating processes leads to high overhead per customer, which impedes growth in customer numbers. This paper presents the results of a survey that provides product software vendors with an overview of their customer configuration updating processes and practices, and benchmarks theirs against competitors using similar technology, of the same size, and active in the same market. These benchmarks contain customized advice to the respondent company that can be used to strategically improve customer configuration updating processes to gain efficiency and effectiveness. The survey was held in the Netherlands, and 74 software vendors responded. Amongst other conclusions, a significant positive correlation was found between success of a software product and a vendor's recent investments into customer configuration updating.