 et al. 2002). Both establishment of spin-off companies and outsourcing of software development tasks move personnel and business activities from vertical industries to the primary software industry. The key factors impacting the success of software products aimed at a vertical market can be viewed from the three perspectives of Fig. 2, the technologies, the vertical industry processes and the position of the software enterprise in the market. All these three viewpoints impact, in many ways, the software to be implemented for automating a specific process. From the vertical industry viewpoint, the processes or systems to be automated using software set both functional and nonfunctional requirements for the system. Considering the functional requirements, it is clear that any piece of software should be customer-oriented (McHugh 1999) in the sense of satisfying certain information processing needs. This requires expertise from the target processes or systems. Bell (1995), for example, emphasizes the importance of targeting niche markets, industry specific conditions, and relationships with important customers in creating this expertise. In practice, expertise may initially be realized in the form of the functionality of a unique piece of software. If the logic of a business process cannot be determined in advance, some parts of the operation have to be performed by a human and the level of automation reached through a software automating the business process will remain limited. In case the Process requirements Level of - automation Environment - productization Ability to implement - complexity of the process implemented with software Software interfaces used Fig. 2 Factors impacting the Hardware success of software solution interfaces used in vertical markets Vertical Software Industries processes vary from an enterprise to another, the process cannot be fully produc- tized and some tailoring, configuring and interfacing of the software will be needed for each enterprise adopting the software. Higher complexity o