According to my Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary both hardware and software are considered uncountable or mass nouns.

But it doesn't mean that they'll always have to behave like this, egg is countable but if one is thinking about the matter (the white of the egg and the yolk) egg is then uncountable.

Software package for instance is countable, maybe one can remove the package thing and we would have an ellipsis, what do you say?

José Roberto