What makes a software company influential? If you ask this question to many people, you may get many answers. However, all of them would agree that an influential software company creates high-quality products and offers excellent services. Moreover, it is financially sound, operates on the basis of a strong business policy, and has great leaders at its helm.

A great company focuses on its strengths, turns weakness into opportunity, takes bold risks, works for social welfare, develops and implements eco-friendly practices, and uses technology effectively.

Let us have a look at some of the most influential software companies in the world.

Microsoft

Ever since its inception several decades ago, Microsoft’s goal is to make an impact on the world. The company has had some great CEOs, starting with Bill Gates, its founder to Satya Nadella, its present leader. Microsoft has always had a role to play in world affairs and major social changes.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates, the founders of Microsoft, had lofty aims of getting PCs into every home and office. And today, we cannot function without a PC; almost every business and home requires one.

In 1980, Microsoft signed a strategic deal with IBM to create an operating system called PC-DOS, which formed the foundation of the Windows operating system. Later, Microsoft got into partnerships with several PC companies to make Windows the top operating system in homes and companies worldwide.

When it started, Microsoft had only 30 employees, but today, it employs hundreds and thousands of professionals worldwide. Thanks to Microsoft and its user-friendly tools, computing is now within the reach of the average individual. Anybody can use Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Paint, and other MS applications.

Through its Windows OS, Microsoft has helped writers, musicians, social worker, volunteers, developers, banks, and many others give their best to society. Microsoft plays an important role in the way we live, manage our money, and work.

Oracle

Along with software companies such as IBM, Salesforce.com, and Adobe, Oracle supplies software programs to help marketers collect, store, and analyze data that can help them make better marketing decisions.

Oracle is the most influential of these companies as it has a say in where various companies spend their advertising budgets. According to Eric Franchi, an investor in ad tech, Oracle is building a comprehensive third-party identity system that all marketers are looking for. Marketers need such a service independent of Facebook and Google. As everybody is a customer of Oracle, even if Facebook and Google pocket all the ad money, Oracle will still target and measure it for companies.

In brief, Oracle helps companies make sense of their data, and over the decades, it has made its marketing cloud better than ever. For example, through its acquisition of BlueKai in 2014, it helps marketers analyze data for targeting digital ads. And through its acquisition of AddThis, it helps companies collect data on people’s activities online.

Oracle’s best acquisition so far, however, is Datalogix, a firm that collects purchase-related data from loyalty cards, stores, credit cards, and so on. Now called Oracle Data Cloud, Datalogix is used by several marketers, including Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook to figure out whether viewers of their ads end up purchasing the products and services.

IBM

International Business Machines (IBM) is the world’s biggest computer company, responsible for several computer-related inventions. The company’s patent leadership is beyond compare, and in this, it tops the list continuously.

IBM owes its success to its commitment to research. The company started with punch card machines and then effortlessly switched on to digital computers. Several decades later, its innovations in computer memory, software, PCs, cognitive computing, and databases made it a billion-dollar business.

Also, IBM remains committed to open-source technology. Although capable of developing technology on its own, it never stops participating in open-source communities such as Apache and Linus. The idea is to outsource technology development to open-source developers so that IBM can use its resources on finding solutions to clients’ problems.

SAP

Established by a team of five entrepreneurs from Germany, SAP stands for standard application software that can be used in real-time data processing.

Ever since its inception, SAP has helped large and medium businesses of all industries. These businesses use SAP for business monitoring and day-to-day operations. SAP ERP systems enable business communication round the clock and eliminate discrepancies of data among subsystems.

A system can be efficient and modern only because of SAP, owing to which all modern businesses have to implement SAP. It helps businesses to scale up efficiently, establish intimate relationships with consumers and clients, improve the quality of a company’s customer support system, take better business decisions, consolidate information, reduce errors, and prevent duplication and redundancy within the system.

SAP SE has its headquarters in Walldorf, Germany and offices in more than 180 countries. The company has more than 335,000 customers from different parts of the world and has continued to retain its rank among the world’s top ten software companies because of its strong market performance.

Dell EMC

Oct 12, 2015 is an important date in EMC’s eventful 25-year-old history as it decided to merge with Dell and become Dell EMC. The company, which was once a storage start-up, had grown to become a world leader in technology. The aim of the merger was to help both companies thrive within the competitive software industry.

The merger of Dell and EMC created a powerhouse in the software and technology industry. It did not take long for Dell EMC to become a world leader thanks to the complementary product portfolios of the two companies and their collective market reach.

Dell EMC has four of the biggest software and technology franchises of the world—virtualization, storage, PCs, and servers. The two companies pooled their strengths in IT trends such as software-defined data centers, converged infrastructure, security, mobile, hybrid cloud, and digital transformation, to mention just a few.

Forbes lists Dell founder Michael Dell as the world’s 25^th richest person. His company, which had always been an influencer, started attracting a lot of attention in 2019 when it grabbed a dominant market share in storage, hyper-converged infrastructure, and storage. In addition to EMC, Dell has also integrated VMware into its system. 

Conclusion

These are just some of the top-performing software companies or most influential software companies in the world. We limited our list to companies that have been around for decades and have stood the test of time.

Do note there are so many other players in the market such as Google, Salesforce.com, Autodesk, ServiceNow, NetApp, Intuit, Dropbox, Veeva Systems, and IC Company but we could not list all. The technological innovations and inventions of these companies have played an important role in changing the way we function as a human race.