CEO Bo Manning said Pivotal developed the applications by working with existing customers to get a handle on the industry's "business model requirements, workflow processes and customer buying patterns."

Mid-Market Moves to the Verticals

Mid-market vendors have been rolling out verticals for some time now, and with the introduction of Microsoft CRM, this trend is likely to accelerate.

Speaking generally, Gartner vice president and research director Ed Thompson told CRMDaily.com that vertical applications will be the only route to long-term survival for mid-size CRM vendors. He does not believe Microsoft CRM will have much of an effect on them in the short run, but four or five years out, most vendors will feel the impact.

Not that any CRM vendors -- regardless of size -- have been blind to the revenue-earning potential of the vertical market. But in recent months, companies from Siebel Mid Market to FrontRange to Pivotal and Oracle all have been rolling out vertical applications with increased vigor.

For example, FrontRange Solutions -- a vendor operating at the low end of the SMB space -- released industry-specific applications of GoldMine CustomerIQ in discrete manufacturing and wealth management last summer.

Financial Services Returns to CRM

Despite all the activity in the vertical space, the financial services industry has never wholly embraced CRM. As early adopters of this technology, many FSIs were burned, or at least disappointed with their results, and subsequently backed off.

"For a period of time, financial service companies were questioning whether they wanted to continue with these projects," Gartner research director Kim Collins told CRMDaily. Now, Collins and other industry analysts say CRM initiatives in the FSI space are getting a second wind.

A number of financial institutions have announced standardizations on Onyx's CRM app in recent months, Bill Bunker, vice president of Onyx's financial services vertical market, told CRMDaily. "We find that leading companies in this space are very focused on their existing customers with the goal of driving customer satisfaction," he added.

Pivotal also has a good track record in this industry, according to Cap Gemini Ernst & Young vice president Kevin Kraft, CRM practice leader for financial services. "They have tended to focus on high-growth clients with revenues of US$2 billion to $3 billion," he told CRMDaily.

Pivotal Features

Features offered in Pivotal's applications include the following: