If you were a tech vendor, would you wish that 36 percent or 64 percent of your market would go away?

By Art Gillis

There are now 37 companies in the bank tech business that provide core applications solutions. Twenty of the solutions are for outsource services. Seventeen are for in-house solutions. Eleven companies provide both modes, and it didn't take a genius to figure out why. Sixty-four percent of all financial institutions use the in-house mode. Thirty-six percent outsource. That's the way it is and that's why smart vendors chose not to fight reality. But only 30 percent of the 37 companies offer both modes. Even though it makes business sense to increase the size of any market, the one-mode vendors are hell bent on sticking with what they were established as. Here's another fact about how this industry has changed. In 1987 there were 113 suppliers of core applications services and only four percent of them were dual mode.