Technographics is data on which software and technology each company uses. The word is modelled on "demographics". A vendor uses it to find every company that runs a particular product, for example a rival's product, or a product that connects well with its own.
The data comes from several sources, and a provider usually combines them. Websites reveal some of their software in their own code. For example, a company's web page may load a script from a known chat tool or analytics tool, and a program that reads the page can see this. Job postings reveal more. A company that advertises for "an engineer with experience of SAP" probably runs SAP. Providers collect websites, postings and public documents in bulk with web scraping programs. Software review platforms add what buyers say they use. Some providers also use data from SaaS management tools, which see the software that companies pay for. Each finding gets a confidence score, because a job posting is weaker evidence than code on a live website.
Say a Gurugram company sells a cloud warehouse management system, the software that tracks stock in a warehouse. A rival's older version runs on the customer's own servers, and it will stop receiving support next year. The Gurugram company searches the technographics data for Indian companies that still run that older version. It finds 380 companies. Of these, 140 are distributors with more than 200 employees. The data also shows that 95 of the 140 use an accounting package that the Gurugram product already connects to. So the sales team writes first to those 95. Its message is specific: "Your current system will stop being supported next year. Ours connects to your accounting software from the first day."
Technographics is usually sold as part of a B2B contact database, or beside it. It is often used together with intent data. The difference is simple. Technographics says which product a company has. Intent data says whether the company is looking to change it.
The data has limits. Software used only inside a company, such as payroll, often leaves few public traces. So technographics is most accurate for software that shows on websites, and least accurate for back-office software.