By Phil Wainewright August 19, 2015
SUMMARY:
Where did the emerging trend towards vertical industry cloud applications spring from and why is it one to watch?
In an April 2014 article that has since been widely shared, I reported Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri’s prediction of five emerging application categories that he believes will dominate cloud computing. Four were functional categories — customer-facing, IT/operations, enterprise backbone, and collaboration/productivity. But the fifth was tangential to the other four, to some extent cutting across or sitting above them — what Bhusri called the “industry specific” application cloud.
This consists of vertical applications tailored to the needs of specific industries, such as patient care, manufacturing and so on. This was the least defined of the five clouds, he said, with no visible leaders at present: “those are still up for grabs.” A year and some on, the vertical cloud remains unconquered, but it’s no longer the neglected backwater it may have seemed back then. Every enterprise cloud vendor has a vertical industry strategy of some kind, from Workday beefing up existing products with functionality and analytics that target specific verticals to NetSuite doubling down on its SuiteCommerce play in the retail sector or Infor splashing out two-thirds of a billion dollars on an acquisition that leverages its micro-verticals strategy in several sectors.
diginomica.com/2015/08/19/...ical-industry-cloud-applications/ |