November 11, 2015

Enterprise application software — vertical and departmental markets

This is part of a three-post series on enterprise application software over the decades, meant to serve as background to a DBMS2 post on issues in enterprise apps.

1. When I started as an analyst in 1981, manufacturers seemed to still be over 40% of the IT market. For them, the distinction between “cross-industry” and “vertical market” application software wasn’t necessarily clear. Indeed, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) can be said to have grown out of the combination of MRP and accounting software, although it never was a manufacturing-specific industry category. ERP also quickly co-opted what was briefly its own separate category, namely SCM (Supply Chain Management) software.

2. Manufacturing aside, other important early vertical markets were banking, insurance and health care. It is no coincidence that these are highly regulated industries; regulations often gave a lot of clarity as to how software should or shouldn’t work. Indeed, the original application software package category was probably general ledger, and the original general ledger packages were probably for banks rather than cross-industry.

3. Payroll processing is of course highly tied to regulation, especially in the area of state and sometimes even local taxation. It’s also one of the very oldest sectors of the computer services business, indeed predating most commercial computing. See for example the Wikipedia article on Automatic Data Processing (ADP) Inc.

In the early days (e.g. 1960s), banks tried to compete for payroll processing business. But the independent computer services industry won.

4. Human resources software often lives in its own world, which is often but not always separate from payroll processing. Reasons include:

On the other hand, while Dave Duffield has started some very innovative HR-first companies — consider the names of PeopleSoft and Workday — they eventually expand(ed) into much of ERP.

5. There are of course many other kinds of department-specific applications. The biggest area is marketing, discussed below. Another set of examples is more verticalized — certain industries use certain kinds of equipment, and there’s an associated need for software. Examples include but are hardly limited to:

I think this group could become much more important in the age of machine-generated data.

6. It is widely reported that marketing departments now control more IT budget than central IT does. Obviously, marketers have used technology since the earliest days of commercial computing, but the big growth started in the 1990s. Signs and triggers I recall from that decade include:

Accordingly, we’ve seen the rise of several marketing-related application software categories, the first few of which got combined under the rubric CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The first of them all was arguably salesforce automation (SFA). Siebel Systems was an SFA pioneer in the 1990s, with a big assist from Andersen Consulting, which was looking to repeat its great success in SAP-related business, and then grew into the rest of the emerging CRM category.

Comments

8 Responses to “Enterprise application software — vertical and departmental markets”

  1. Enterprise application software — generalities | Software Memories on November 11th, 2015 5:30 am

    […] The second calls out characteristics of specific application areas. […]

  2. Notes on the technology supporting packaged application software | Software Memories on December 6th, 2015 1:23 am

    […] The second calls out characteristics of specific application areas. […]

  3. Issues in enterprise application software | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on February 12th, 2016 1:26 am

    […] with this post, I’m putting up a three post series on the history of enterprise apps. Takeaways include but are not limited […]

  4. v2 cigs coupon code for october 2012 on December 25th, 2016 11:47 pm

    v2 cigs coupon code for october 2012

    Enterprise application software — vertical and departmental markets | Software Memories

  5. Coordination, the underused “C” word | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on February 28th, 2017 11:34 pm

    […] of the early IT wins were in pure accounting and information management. But a lot of the rest were in various forms of […]

  6. Coordination, the underused “C” word – Cloud Data Architect on March 4th, 2017 1:24 am

    […] of the early IT wins were in pure accounting and information management. But a lot of the rest were in various forms of […]

  7. click on November 23rd, 2020 2:41 am

    click

    Software Memories — History of the software industry, its companies and its personalities

  8. visit the site on November 24th, 2020 6:45 am

    visit the site

    Software Memories — History of the software industry, its companies and its personalities

Leave a Reply




Feed including blog about software history Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.