The emergence of industry vertical cloud-based companies is a new phenomenon in business. Recently, Forbes Magazine published an article entitled The Five Hallmarks of An Industry Cloud Company, acknowledging this rapid rise of vertically-focused companies and how they may eventually displace horizontally-focused technology companies. HedgeSPA has been named in the article as one of the dozen emergent companies in the financial technology space, due to our success as a startup in establishing a high-performance investment analytics engine platform.

The article identified five key hallmarks of an industry cloud company in the article:

1. Talent Trifecta: A powerful blend of technical and sales acumen, along with domain expertise and extensive experience in a specific industry vertical

2. Deep Data: Ability to create customer value from user data by providing meaningful insights for the customers

3. Referral Revenues: Building a reputation through reference within the industry

4. Massive Market Share: Ability to achieve greater penetration that often leads to a winner-takes-all environment

5. Layer Cake Product Strategy: Several layers of value in terms of functionality

Based on these five criteria, the Forbes article has looked at industries such as financial technology (fintech), energy, transportation and legal. Clearly, being identified as one of the emergent fintech companies by the oldest and arguably most authoritative business magazine in the US is an acknowledgement that HedgeSPA is meeting at least some of these criteria.

The full article is available here.

HedgeSPA Sales and Support, April 2014