This is not to say that there are so few viable competitors in each category that selecting the best-of-breed is as easy as selecting the market niches one targets and the vendors within that category. What it means is that competitive pressures are so intense on new entrants -- as well as on the entities already entrenched and occupying various turfs -- that the need to clearly and completely distinguish their client targets, service offerings, practice strategies and end user interaction, data collection and delivery methods have become vital considerations which impact the practice's very survival.

For accountants and vendors alike, finding viable partners that are putting unique spins on traditional approaches, therefore, becomes simpler because the strategies of so many of them become more distinct all the time.

The truth is that the very competitive urgency that created the concept of convergence in the first place is also contributing to its obsolescence. The idea that categorical lines will blur to the point that solution providers of all types will become indistinguishable from one another has passed. We are now at the beginning of a period of divergence, where solution providers are so different from one another that there are in fact more classifications than ever that can be used to identify them.

Evidence of this is rampant among the accounting industry vendors whose activities are reported on within this web site and our industry press. Their business and technology strategies, their insurgent actions and their reactions to competitive shifts are indicative of the kinds of efforts other solution providers in their particular niches will need to pursue to keep up.

Within each sector or category, one or possibly more prospective partners, must possess that single characteristic that distinguishes it within the solution provider category it occupies -- a characteristic believed to be an indicator or the necessary strategic direction of the category.

Those distinctions vary from subject to subject. Some entities are distinct because of the clients or geographical regions they are pursuing. Others have combined new technology formats and new approaches to providing services or concentrate on delivering specific applications in a singular manner.

Others have identified problems that exist somewhere within the vortex where accounting professionals, vendors and client applications intersect and dedicated their business models to solving them.

Divergence will not usurp convergence in all realms. In the accounting industry domain, the concept of convergence is likely to remain intact for some time, given all solutions provider's needs for ongoing practice development evolution and the similarity of the technological means of accomplishment that traverse an accounting industry terrain noted for rear-mirror navigation. But the new and varied classes of content being created for the capture of client's data, transport, processing and delivery of meaningful financial statements over new networks and channels, along with the many specific categories of clients targeted to receive it, will serve to make the structure of the accounting industry increasingly diverse and profitable.