The cloud’s main story so far has been one of horizontal providers, such as salesforce.com, Microsoft and Amazon, offering one-size-fits-all solutions. While these providers had some success in the financial services sector, their products weren’t specialized enough to address the needs of asset managers or bankers.
The advent of vertical SaaS providers was the topic of my latest article, Will 2014 be the Year of Vertical Clouds, written for Wired. Even though they’re a young market today, expect to see a larger number of these vertical cloud providers getting scale and attention, in 2014.
“In the days before the cloud, on-premise software providers that focused on selling into a vertical market were considered second-class citizens to the ‘big guns’ selling into the broader horizontal marketplace. However, with the advent of the SaaS model, the tables have turned,” according to Gordon Ritter of Emergence Capital.