Solution Providers Get Vertical Victories

Reducing the scope of your business may seem like an odd way to protect yourself against a slumping economy, but for solution providers, it just may be the key to success.

Several Web integrators and Internet consulting companies have ditched their horizontal strategies and aligned themselves with vertical markets. While the plan sometimes cuts down the number of customer deals and clients, solution providers believe sticking to a select number of prolific industries will pay off in the long run.

For example, C-bridge rebranded itself as a "vertical solution provider" this year and focuses on a small number of markets, including high-tech manufacturing. With customers such as Seagate and Agilent, the IT field has become one of C-bridge's best customer pools. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company recently completed projects for optical networking company Ciena, which included integrating its enterprise applications and building a customer service extranet. C-bridge is now working on a supply-chain system for Motorola.

"We're too small to be a market leader, so we need to ride the wave of certain markets and fill in the gaps," C-bridge CEO Joe Bellini says. "Now we're finding areas in specific verticals where we can solve specific problems."

Other integrators and consultants are making the vertical focus a popular strategy by winning new customers. Emerald Solutions has traditionally focused on the telecommunications and transportation verticals, but the solution provider has begun tackling the media and entertainment market. Emerald recently teamed up with ATG to relaunch ReadersDigest.com and acquired valuable experience with the vertical that the solution provider has already used to win two major players in the industry.

"We don't have the corporate resume in media and entertainment yet that we have in the other two verticals," Emerald CEO Martin Wright says. "[But] we're now able to demonstrate that knowledge in the media and entertainment industry is paying big dividends for us."

For more on this topic, read our 2001 VARBusiness 500 issue on June 25.

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