The Strategic Turnaround: Cordys Repositions To Verticals With An Indirect Sales Model

Cordys is one of the few promising new entrants into the integration and process improvement middleware market; it was recently named a leader in the Forrester Wave™ of integration-centric business process management suites. While its technology is comprehensive, the company faced the trap common to emerging technology vendors: great technology combined with a failing go-to-market strategy. This SWOT analysis explores Cordys' situation during 2007/2008 as an example of this trap and demonstrates the significant turnaround of its go-to-market strategy since mid-2008. In particular, Forrester believes that the shift from a direct sales model to a partner-driven, vertically focused approach is more promising for a technology provider like Cordys. Smaller, more agile vendors like Cordys may also be able to take advantage of new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market opportunities in the coming year more quickly than the large, established platform providers can. 2009 will be critical for Cordys as the vendor attempts to combine its leading-edge technology platform with a successful and sustainable corporate marketing strategy.