Breaking into .NET Component Sales

ionidas

If this is the wrong forum for this sort of post, please disregard this. The short read of this post is, my company's developed custom .NET controls for our own internal use, and I'm looking to find out how I can determine if there is a market for these sorts of controls.

I work for a small company that builds and automates special test equipment (mostly for the automotive industry). Of course, this has been a rough patch, so we've been exploring different ways to bring in revenue.

Up until now, almost all of the software we've written (about 75% for industrial PLC platforms, but the rest in VB .NET and/or C#) has been one-time-use essentially; that is, we write a custom application for one machine, and that specific application is unique. However, over time we've written many controls and class libraries that could be sold individually or as a package to other developers.

As an example, many of our machines handle signal processing. We've written a control that uses Direct3D to render signal plots on a pannable and zoomable background to make examining the signal much easier and more flexible (the overall effect is similar to viewing the signal plotted on a CAD background that can be zoomed and/or panned). I'd imagine this sort of control would be useful to other people at a reasonable price, but I live in a sheltered world; I don't even really know where to start when it comes to selling software is a commodity.

Does anyone have any advice or comments for a new-to-software-selling fella like me?

John Girard
ASC