In Business of Software Vertical versus Horizontal

Vertical versus Horizontal:

• vertical merger means a merger with says a supplier.

• Horizontal merger means one with a competior.

What are they?

I think Vertical refers to a Chain of customer/Suppliers.

Vertical:

Vertical can also mean a particular industry or sector

ie,”oil & Gas” or “Auto manufacturing”.

Horizontal:

Horizontal Would be a Categorization that cuts across

Vertical,ie.”Windows System Administrators” or

“Accounting Managers”.

Going Vertical means targetting a group of customers who

are all in the same industry.

Examples:

A vertically targetted ISV might go after financial companies or Manufacturing Companies.Each of those represents vertical market.

Targetting a Horizontal market segments means making your

products or Services available to a variety of different companies that do totally different things.

Examples:

Windows XP has broad Horizontal appeal because it’s in use by all kinds of businesses,consumers & even students.

Totally different types of users.

When I sold Sun Hardware,

Vertical Scaling meant that you could add more CPUs,

RAM,ect ..to one machine.

Horizontal Scaling meant adding more Smaller machines.

The web tier of a 3-tier solution should scale

Horizontally (more load=more servers).

The DB powering the backend should be on hardware that scale Vertically(more load=more RAM,CPUs,ect..).

A definition of a vertical market is one that deals with a particular

industry meeting its needs,

A horizontal market is more general,it appeals to,or deals

with a much wider range of business,uses,ect…

‘A market which meets a given need of a wide variety of industries , rather than a specific one , for

eg:word processing software’.

A same site classes a vertical market as:

‘A market which meets the needs of a particular industry,

for eg:a piece of equipment used only by semiconductor manfactures’.

Empirical analysis of vertical & horizontal Intra Industry Trade.

Horizontal & vertical milling Machines manufacture