Eleven Steps To The Right Verticals 3.0 Strategy

Tech vendors are increasingly focusing on vertical industry opportunities — and appropriately so, given Forrester's forecast that industry-specific solutions will represent a rapidly growing proportion of the overall market for information and communications technology (ICT) products and services purchased by business and government. But not all vendors should focus on verticals, and not all solutions need to be vertical. Moreover, Forrester distinguishes three generations of vertical solutions, so vendors that do go vertical need to choose which generation to offer. We think that the best revenue potential will come from the newest generation of vertical solutions — what we call verticals 3.0 offerings that use Smart Computing technologies to provide a combination of hardware, software, and network services to help address key challenges in certain verticals. We developed a series of questions to help vendor strategists determine the right vertical priorities, which verticals to address, and what capabilities they need to have to succeed in those verticals.