I have been spending a lot of time lately with Tidemark‘s Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project.
If you are not familiar with their work, the short version is this: they have built one of the most rigorous frameworks I have encountered for understanding why certain software companies become genuinely indispensable. Control Points. Systems of Record. The idea that the biggest winners eventually stop being software companies and start being infrastructure for entire industries.
Good stuff. Worth your time.
But as I worked through it, something started nagging at me.
The framework explains how companies win a vertical. What it does not fully address is what happens to every organization sitting inside that vertical once the world outside their systems starts moving faster than their systems can process.
That is the problem I keep running into everywhere I look right now.
The systems exist. The trust in what they’re telling you often doesn’t.
Most enterprises are not underinvested in software. They have CRM. ERP. Supply chain platforms. Financial systems. Workflow tools.
But here is what the org chart does not show: a lot of those systems are inherited. Built by teams that no longer exist, configured by admins who left three years ago, extended by consultants who solved a problem nobody remembers having. The CRM has been “fixed” by four different sales leaders, each with a different philosophy about what clean data looks like. The ERP has fields nobody uses and reports nobody trusts. The integrations half-work on a good day.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s just how enterprise technology accumulates over time. Systems don’t get built so much as inherited, patched, and lived with.
And those platforms still do exactly what Tidemark would predict. They become the center of gravity. Decisions get recorded in them. Work flows through them. Data piles up inside them, clean or not.
But every one of those systems, tidy or chaotic, was built to tell you what happened. Some have gotten reasonably good at telling you what’s happening right now. Almost none were built to tell you what’s about to happen.
That gap has always existed. What’s changed is the cost of living with it. Competitive advantage used to be measured in quarters, then months. Now it’s days, sometimes hours. A competitor’s hiring surge that telegraphs a product launch, a supplier’s leadership turnover two weeks before a quality issue surfaces, a regulatory filing that quietly redraws a market. By the time any of that shows up in a quarterly review, the window has already closed. That’s where deals get lost, suppliers fail, and risk quietly becomes a crisis nobody saw coming.
The signal problem nobody has solved
The challenge isn’t a lack of data. It’s the opposite.
Leadership changes. Financial distress. Regulatory shifts. M&A activity reshaping your customer base. Hiring patterns that telegraph a competitor’s next move. Supplier fragility hiding in plain sight. Capital flows pointing toward markets before the markets know it themselves.
These signals exist, and most of them are sitting in the public record right now. The problem is volume: there are millions of them, they arrive continuously, and turning any individual signal into a decision in time to matter requires a kind of synthesis no team can do manually at scale.
This is why I keep coming back to decision intelligence as the defining capability of the next decade: not AI as a feature bolted onto something else, but the organizational ability to understand what matters before your competitors do, and move on it while the window is still open.
What comes after the System of Record
Enterprise software spent thirty years solving one problem very well: recording what happened. The next generation of platforms has a different job: helping organizations understand what’s about to happen, and what to do about it.
The winners won’t just have more data. They’ll have better answers to four questions most organizations can’t answer today: Which signals actually matter right now? Which ones can we ignore? What do the relevant ones require us to do? And how fast do we have to move?
Answering those questions well is a different problem than running the business day to day. That’s where Polaris I/O comes in. It ingests, enriches, and connects millions of external signals to the decisions that leaders across revenue, supply chain, media, and enterprise risk need to make every day. And critically, it doesn’t require the underlying systems to be clean. It works around the debt, not through it.
Same problem, wildly different contexts
On the surface, the use cases look nothing alike. A CRO wants to know which accounts are moving toward a purchase before they raise their hand. A supply chain leader wants to see supplier instability before it becomes a disruption they have to explain to the board. A PE operating partner wants to know where portfolio company performance is quietly deteriorating and where value creation is still possible. An energy company wants situational awareness across geopolitical and operational developments that nobody flagged in time last quarter.
Different industries, different stakes, different workflows. But strip it down and it’s always the same thing underneath: find the signal before everyone else does, and connect it to the right decision before the moment passes.
What Tidemark got right, and where it leads
Their core argument is that the most valuable platforms become the Control Point for their industry. I think that’s correct. Every major sector will continue to have systems that serve as the operational backbone of how work gets done, however imperfect that backbone may be in practice.
What those Control Points can’t do on their own is process the outside world. They weren’t designed for that. They were designed to record the inside world, and most of them are still catching up on that job.
As signal volume keeps compounding, the Control Point increasingly needs something alongside it: something that can prioritize attention in real time, connect external developments to internal decisions before the window closes, surface risk early enough to act on it, and tell you where to focus next across a set of priorities that never stops shifting.
A remote control, basically. Not because the Control Point is broken (though sometimes it genuinely is), but because the environment surrounding it has become a fundamentally different kind of problem, one that no system of record was ever designed to solve.
The organizations that build durable advantage over the next decade won’t just have better systems of record. They’ll have better systems of awareness.
The Control Point runs the business. The remote controls what happens next.
