Creating a horizontal niche business in the Cloud
The Cloud offers many opportunities to prospective start-ups. The market is growing exponentially and many organisations are following a Cloud First strategy.
The classic technology business model is to identify the ‘beachhead’ customer, give the customer a unique product or service and then exploit the vertical where the beachhead exists. This enables the start-up customer to learn the specialised language of the vertical market be it FinServe, Media, OEM Manufacturer etc. and work successfully in that market.
The Cloud offers something a bit different and has changed the way that IT companies work. The market is so large in fact that new start-up business models are possible. Certainly ‘Crossing the Chasm’ is still a viable option in the Cloud, but there are also opportunities to create businesses that reside horizontally to the market.
We are seeing start-ups such as Birst and Tableau working hard to become leaders in Analytics and BI in the Cloud; Jobscience and Fairsale leading the charge for Cloud based Human Resource applications and Docusign and Globalsign addressing eSignature market. Many other examples exist and there are clearly niche market requirements that are not yet being addressed.
At Cloud Perspective we believe that if we can be the best we can possibly be in a niche space then this puts us on the pathway to success. The market need that we address is Cloud Data Quality particularly in the Salesforce.com space but in making this our niche it has meant that we need to thoroughly understand Salesforce and its associated applications, ETL, Cloud based MDM, Address Validation, DQ Monitoring and we’ve needed to learn how to create Hybrid solutions that sit in the Cloud but also interact with on premise back office systems.
As our business has grown we’ve found that the services we offer are as applicable to a Premiership football club as they are to a wholesale bank or a high (main) street shopping chain and indeed many other types of business.
The Cloud opportunity remains vast and there are many niches to exploit and the time to do so is now.
Martyn Leman