Small office, home office
Small Office, Home Office (translated small office, home office ) is the name for a customer group in the IT sector . It is used to distinguish the customer segment characterized by the terms home or consumer , which mainly includes private, small business and freelance users ( private households and small businesses ), from larger medium-sized companies and large companies , which are addressed under the keywords enterprise or corporate .
Since the products designed for small and home offices are often intended to appeal to ambitious consumers such as power users , the English product categorization is not always practical. Many manufacturers no longer differentiate between products for private and commercial users.
In view of the increasing performance of the hardware, the differentiation helps the manufacturers of IT hardware to differentiate part of their product range from other, important areas of application, for example from products for science & research (in the area of measurement data acquisition , medical imaging processes or high-precision sensor technology ) and for industrial usage ( CAD / CAM / CNC applications, rapid prototyping , industrial robot control or real-time operating systems in production and monitoring).
Some examples of devices are:
In the area of commercial and especially proprietary software licenses, there are often different categories such as "Educational Edition" (edition for educational institutions such as schools and universities), "Home User" ( home users, end users ), " SOHO Edition " and "Corporate Edition" ( Corporate edition).