Publications
Publications
- April 2001 (Revised March 2003)
- HBS Case Collection
XUMA
By: Andrew P. McAfee and Kerry Herman
Abstract
XUMA is a Silicon Valley start-up that builds customized eBusiness software suites for its corporate clients. This market is crowded with large players, including the major consulting and systems integration companies. To date, building these suites has been a very labor intensive process, which starts essentially from scratch with each new customer. As a result, the suites are expensive and time consuming to develop, and the companies that construct them function largely as "body shops." XUMA is attempting a very different approach. Its founders believe that the software components that make up eBusiness suites have become much like the hardware components that make up a computer; self-contained, modular, and easy to interconnect. They therefore seek to make XUMA an "assembly line" for eBusiness solutions, putting together these components (using proprietary software "glue") rapidly and cheaply. If they succeed at this, they will have divorced the price they can charge for their solutions from the cost of building them.
Keywords
Production; Software; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention; Information Technology Industry; California
Citation
McAfee, Andrew P., and Kerry Herman. "XUMA." Harvard Business School Case 601-170, April 2001. (Revised March 2003.)