Finding A Niche In Verticals
OR MANY CHANNEL PARTNERS, it may be natural to overlook the business potential of companies in niche vertical industries because, well, they’re in niche markets. As small companies in discrete industries such as construction, nonprofit, real estate, and transportation, niche verticals have specific and quite often unique needs, and as such don’t represent a significant market for channel partners in terms of total IT spending. But niche verticals, like many smaller businesses, look to IT products and services to streamline their operations, drive revenue, and improve productivity. Consequently, it would behoove channel partners seeking to grow their businesses to give companies in niche verticals a look.
The commercial real estate industry, for example, is hungry for IT products and services—and knowledgeable channel partners to provide them. Scott Metro, a partner in the real estate technology practice at consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in Boston, says there are plenty of very small companies that are running commercial real estate portfolios with no permanent IT staff. “There’s an opportunity for smaller integrators to implement solutions and then continue to provide support,” Metro says. “There are many small real estate companies that have billions of dollars in investments that rely on an IT person who comes in one day a week.”
Typically, the primary responsibilities of these once-aweek IT contractors are to make sure all the wires are plugged in and the email server works. “What we see in many of these contractors is a focus on networking, rather than on the applications that can help run and grow the business specific to the needs of the industry,” Metro adds. What small real estate firms need are people who have a deep knowledge of vertical applications.
Even small real estate companies must collect, consolidate, report, and analyze significant amounts of asset-related information. According to Metro, the vertical applications that dominate the market are property management systems and portfolio management software that facilitate the reporting of real estate data and the modeling of portfolio returns, respectively.
Yardi Systems Inc. of Santa Barbara, Calif., and Intuit Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., offer property management suites for a number of real estate markets. New York City-based AssetEye Inc. provides portfolio management software that Metro describes as a ready-made data warehouse that requires little customization. “Many of these packages will meet 80 percent of the needs of the typical real estate company,” Metro says.
