Sep 16, 2026 · 54 min · 11 segments
What if the next great software companies don't look like Salesforce… or even ChatGPT? Dominic Dinardo has spent more than 25 years watching the software industry reinvent itself. He joined…
Maybe just to drill into that for one second though, John, some people might look at a market like this and say, yes, there's a lot of software spend, but none of it's really vertical yet.
I mean, I know that Salesforce has its CPG cloud and there are lots of point solutions that are smaller, but Some people might look at the market and say, well, maybe that's a sign that there are not industry specific functions, features, nuances that support it.
Was there a problem you saw in this industry that convinced you? No, there's like the DNA of a truly vertical platform like with Viva.
I don't want to go too technical because I'll probably lose your audience, but there's actually quite a few facets to it that are very, very specific.
So just like Vitva introduced Vault for pharmaceuticals, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but it was like a...
Kind of like an intelligent document management platform that was very closely aligned with the production of drugs.
A lot of the CRM capabilities you need are completely intertwined with photo automation.
So there's key functional things you need to do that just don't exist in horizontal solutions.
And I would also further say, I already touched on it, the need for mobile software, the ability to work when you disconnect from the internet.
Here's a fun fact, you know, the internet's not too good when you're trying to sell ice cream, when you're, you know, there's refrigerators and chillers and coolers and Lots of things that block signals around you.
And what we find is, and I can judge the evidence from our own competitive pursuits, What we find is it's actually, I probably should say this live on your thing, but honestly, it's harder to compete with another variable vendor than it is with a horizontal one.
I'm looking at all those things I just told you, all those functions and capabilities and explaining why you need it and explaining the value of them.
And a large horizontal player will do the opposite it'll politically sell it try to do like an enterprise license agreement you know it comes to the top of the pyramid and they'll try and say hey we've got everything and you can just do it but what we find is we get a lot of business from the people who bought those types of solutions and then can't solve the problem happens much more often than everyone wants to talk about you don't want to talk about it because it's kind of embarrassing but it's true and it happens it happens all the time and you know uh It's really interesting because if I look at like customers that we've won, like L'Oreal or Lego or, you know, Asahi, different pursuits we've had.
Maybe just to drill into that for one second though, John, some people might look at a market like this and say, yes, there's a lot of software spend, but none of it's really vertical yet.
I mean, I know that Salesforce has its CPG cloud and there are lots of point solutions that are smaller, but Some people might look at the market and say, well, maybe that's a sign that there are not industry specific functions, features, nuances that support it.
Was there a problem you saw in this industry that convinced you? No, there's like the DNA of a truly vertical platform like with Viva.
I don't want to go too technical because I'll probably lose your audience, but there's actually quite a few facets to it that are very, very specific.
So just like Vitva introduced Vault for pharmaceuticals, I don't know if you're familiar with this, but it was like a...
Kind of like an intelligent document management platform that was very closely aligned with the production of drugs.
A lot of the CRM capabilities you need are completely intertwined with photo automation.
So there's key functional things you need to do that just don't exist in horizontal solutions.
And I would also further say, I already touched on it, the need for mobile software, the ability to work when you disconnect from the internet.
Here's a fun fact, you know, the internet's not too good when you're trying to sell ice cream, when you're, you know, there's refrigerators and chillers and coolers and Lots of things that block signals around you.
And what we find is, and I can judge the evidence from our own competitive pursuits, What we find is it's actually, I probably should say this live on your thing, but honestly, it's harder to compete with another variable vendor than it is with a horizontal one.
I'm looking at all those things I just told you, all those functions and capabilities and explaining why you need it and explaining the value of them.
And a large horizontal player will do the opposite it'll politically sell it try to do like an enterprise license agreement you know it comes to the top of the pyramid and they'll try and say hey we've got everything and you can just do it but what we find is we get a lot of business from the people who bought those types of solutions and then can't solve the problem happens much more often than everyone wants to talk about you don't want to talk about it because it's kind of embarrassing but it's true and it happens it happens all the time and you know uh It's really interesting because if I look at like customers that we've won, like L'Oreal or Lego or, you know, Asahi, different pursuits we've had.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.