GOING VERTICAL

by Steve Andriole, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

Vertical industries have mature relationships with information technology. It's not like we're still trying to figure out how banks should use IT to solve their problems. I realize that one can always hire an army of consultants to do whatever is necessary, but why bloat the process with additional overhead? Aren't the financial services, pharmaceutical, and the chemical industries -- among others -- big enough to justify their own infrastructure requirements -- and solutions?

Just about all of the major vertical industries have sets of requirements that may be generalized across the companies within that industry. Are Fidelity's infrastructure requirements all that different from Vanguard's? Are Dupont's all that different from Rohm's and Haas'? What happens when RFID really takes off? How many flavors will there be? Why wouldn't there be one primary flavor for each vertical industry?

I'd love to see the major vendors of hardware, software, and communications infrastructure develop full vertical suites complete with all of the bells, whistles, and hooks that make it possible to transact business across any number of vertical industries. Issues like privacy, compliance, reporting, business-to-business (B2B) transaction processing, data representation, and security, among others, are approached differently by different vertical industries. Why can't we get some help here to create intra-industry infrastructure?

Are you tired of buying, deploying, and supporting capabilities that you seldom, if ever, use? Human factors experts have told us for years that almost all of us use about 10% of the capabilities of Microsoft Office but, of course, pay for 100%. One of the most interesting opportunities for open source providers is the possibility of simplifying hardware and (especially) software architectures. It's unlikely that the major proprietary vendors will travel down this path, but the Linux desktop crowd could move in this direction pretty easily.

But the real leverage still lies with the optimization of proprietary infrastructure technology. While the open source community wants to simplify its offerings, real progress could be made if the proprietary vendors would lighten and verticalize their technology: we really don't need all the bells and whistles they shrink-wrap; instead, we need stripped down -- and juiced up -- technology to optimally support specific vertical industries.

For decades, vendors have offered one-size-fits-all infrastructure technology that gets "tuned" by inhouse or outside consultants after it's deployed. Applications vendors have offered specific solutions to several industries for years. Manufacturing, financial services, and healthcare all have their technology leaders but they tend to be on the applications -- not the infrastructure -- side. Let's challenge the vendors to not only develop customized infrastructure solutions but let's also get them to develop simple infrastructure technologies that satisfy specific industry requirements -- without the overkill that characterizes just about every infrastructure technology out there.

Let's push these people to customize and simplify our vertical worlds. Vertical industry infrastructure requirements are far from mysterious. Why can't they make our vertical lives easier? It's interesting that large vendors tend to migrate down from large enterprises, to small and medium-sized business and even to SOHOs (small office/home office) versions of their applications, but seldom move across industries to optimize their vertical offerings. Ideally, they would build a proverbial 2X2 matrix of sizeXvertical industry and begin to dutifully populate all of the cells. In the short run, I'd settle for the cell entitled: "Large Enterprise/Financial Services" (or Manufacturing, or Healthcare... ) infrastructure solutions.

-- Steve Andriole, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium