Blog: Craig Schiff

« BPM Summit: Business Over Technology | Main | BPM Pulse - Is BPM Performing? »

Verticalization

This should be a top trend, but it's not. At least not yet. Most companies we speak with would love to find a product that comes out of the box customized for their business, or at least their industry. This is particularly true when talking about dashboards. Surely banks, as an example, have a lot of the same requirements and track many of the same key performance indicators as each other. Why then doesn't almost every vendor offer a 'banking dashboard'? The trend seems to be going the other way. There was a BPM vendor called INEA focused on addressing the needs of a single vertical: banking. They got acquired by Cartesis and their products became part of Cartesis' generic offering. Is INEA's failure to succeed on its own an illustration of why more vendors don't pursue a vertical strategy?

I think the reason we have yet to see more industry-specific BPM offerings is that the vendors don't want to limit their potential market. That may be what INEA did by focusing on only one industry, but couldn't the vendors have a generic offering overlaid with features, modules, and templates targeting specific verticals? That way they could have the best of both worlds. Oracle today is an example of this. They have a robust BPM suite that can meet the needs of most industries, but they also have modules and capabilities specifically targeted at financial services firms. Most other vendors are content to offer packaged demos and pre-sales experts that speak the language of various industries, but they don't go much deeper than that. I guess the prospective BPM customers will have to wait a little longer for the lower learning curve, shorter implementation timeframes, and reduced total cost of ownership that true vertical solutions should be able to provide.

Share: