If your cloud business practice isn't blending vertical market know-how with technical savvy, it could be missing out on mission-critical projects in financial services, retail, health care and other key sectors.

As more businesses trust mission-critical applications to software as a service (SaaS) or private cloud infrastructure, many cloud integration pioneers are talking up industry expertise as a go-to-market differentiator.

In September, for example, Bluewolf introduced an offering called Producer360, a Salesforce solution specifically intended for insurance carriers. The offering addresses processes unique to this industry's customer relationship concerns.

"As we reach a saturation point for CRM services, the need for verticalization and the need for going deeper within that vertical will increase," said Brock Hubbard, financial services practice manager for Bluewolf, which makes its corporate headquarters in New York.

There are two big reasons why this is so, according to the integrators interviewed for this article. First, client-facing engineers need to understand compliance and regulatory concerns that are specific to certain types of companies; and second, they need to understand the inner workings of important business processes and end-to-end sales lifecycles.

Bluewolf has delivered industry-specific projects for some time, but the company made a conscious decision internally at the end of 2013 to really invest in this strategy, Hubbard said. Right now, the practice is primarily focused on financial services with insurance, wealth management, and regional banking receiving particular attention. It took about six months to find and hire individuals with the relevant expertise to create a cohesive vertical team, he said.

Chicago-based Fruition Partners, which specializes in projects and connector technologies for the ServiceNow service management platform, is likewise seeing an increase in work requiring intimate knowledge of business processes.

"In order to convince people of the value of these solutions in a language that they understand, we need those subject matter experts," said Fruition co-founder and CEO Marc Talluto.

Concerto Cloud Services (which emerged from IT consulting company Tribridge) has organized around industry concerns since its inception, said Greg Pierce, vice president of Concerto Cloud Services. "We have always had industry experts and always understood that people needed this expertise to thrive," he said.

Where is this integrator focused? Here are three of its biggest solution areas: consumer products and package goods, manufacturing, and health care.

New Twist On Insight

Appirio takes a slightly different view of the need for vertical-market knowledge: it encourages consultants to seek disruptive approaches from one industry that could be applied to others, said Narinder Singh, co-founder of the San Francisco-based cloud solutions specialist.

"I would question whether [vertical expertise] is important in the way that traditional integrators describe it," Singh said. "Every industry is undergoing disruption, and under those circumstances, the typical mentality is actually a deterrent."

For that reason, Appirio encourages its deployment teams to focus on at least two verticals that could feed off each other. Training people on more sectors than that could result in too much fragmentation, he said.

"There's no doubt that understanding an industry in context is important, but the real question for innovation is how it can be different," Singh added.