Vertical Velocity

I predicted 2016 will be the year of verticals in the enterprise software space. We are off to a good start.

This morning Jose Duarte, CEO of Unit4 updated us about the Higher Education acquisition they made a few months ago and under NDA touched on other verticals they are looking at, within their broad focus on “people centric” industries.

NetSuite also announced this morning it has acquired its partner, IQity’s cloud business. Built on its SDN Platform, IQity should enhance NetSuite’s penetration of manufacturing customers with its  shop floor, resource capacity planning, finite production scheduling, batch work order management, integrated quality management and advanced data collection capabilities.

At HIMSS, the annual major healthcare event this week, Salesforce announcedthe general availability of its Health Cloud, a patient relationship management solution and an ecosystem which includes the Philips HealthSuite digital platform and tools like Apogee and MuleSoft to connect to electronic health record systems.

Infor has an analyst briefing coming up in a couple of week and I am looking forward to hearing about their momentum in the retail/grocery sector in particular.

Much more to come…