In 20 years as an IT business owner, I have usually recommended that my small business and nonprofit clients pursue Vertical SaaS apps and vertical desktop Software instead of horizontal applications.
Why customize general, horizontal software to your business -- or worse, customize your business to the software -- when you can usually find software built for your industry from the ground up?
Horizontal applications strive for a "one size fits as many businesses as possible" approach.
You mainly benefit from a lower up front cost but the total cost of ownership will usually be higher when you calculate the costs and time lost to fitting it to your company's operations and workflows.
Some horizontal software companies do attempt to create verticalized versions of their applications but not as successfully as natively vertical software.
Examples of horizontal software:
- Productivity software such as Microsoft Office, Google Docs and Open Office
- Accounting software such as Quickbooks and Sage and Freshbooks
- Project management software such as Asana, monday.com and Trello
- Sales applications such as SalesForce, Freshsales and Pipedrive
- CRMs such as Hubspot and Zoho
- your web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera)
Vertical applications, also known as Line of Business (LOB) applications, save small businesses time and increase efficiency and productivity because they work the way your industry does.
Yep, you typically pay more for that, but in my experience the ROI has been worth it for my clients as the seamless integrations not only save time but also generate growth through automated sales, marketing and service tasks and the greatly enhanced communication between departments.
Thus, you have less configuring to do to twist the application to fit your business. You will even find that SMBs in your industry have created these vertical applications because of their frustration with horizontal apps, so they live and breathe your organization's pain points every day and endeavor to solve them.
You can usually find vertical applications that have been built for your industry's regulatory and financial environments and integrate multiple functions such as CRM, Marketing, Sales, Service, Parts, etc., within a single pane of glass.
For help determining if a vertical application would be best for your organization and performing a Vendor Risk Assessment on the software providers for your industry, contact me at 302-537-4198, [email protected] or on our Contact form.
