Small Office, Home Office

Small Office, Home Office (SOHO, especially in English and SoHo; translated small office, home office ) is the name for a group of customers in the IT sector between predominantly private, small commercial and professional users (English Home or consumer) and large enterprises (English Enterprise or Corporate ), ie mainly for small businesses.

Compared to Enterprise products SOHO products are often designed less durable, eg in terms of long term support and product life cycle, or in their firmware, or the application context of their operating system limited scalability. But they are often cheaper, usually easier to install and maintain. In particular, there are products that for individual PCs and their peripherals to small workgroup networks ( LAN / WLAN) are designed.

Often SOHO products appeal to even the most ambitious consumers and power users, which is why most us- English product categorization for Small Office & Home Office usage is not quite true. Many manufacturers therefore no longer distinguish between products for private consumers and SOHOs. This became SOHO products over time virtually all commercial, freikäuflichen PCs, their accessories and peripherals, notebooks and netbooks, tablets, operating systems and applications.

Given always -improving performance values ​​in almost all hardware areas helps to distinguish the manufacturers of IT hardware still here, more clearly delineate their SOHO products of other important application areas, such as products for science & research ( in the field of data acquisition, medical imaging procedures or high-precision sensor technology) and for industrial usage ( CAD-/CAM-/CNC-Anwendungen, rapid prototyping, industrial robot control or real-time operating systems in production and monitoring).

Some examples of SOHO networking devices and peripherals are:

  • SOHO routers
  • SOHO NAS
  • SOHO switch or hub
  • SOHO printers
  • SOHO multifunction device

In the area of commercial and in particular proprietary software licenses are often divisions into different categories like " home user " ( home users, end users ), " SoHo Edition", "Educational Edition" (issue for educational institutions such as schools and universities) and "Corporate Edition" (corporate output) made ​​with rising cost of the license.

Computer-aided design Computer-aided manufacturing Numerical control Ethernet hub
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