The Mid-Market Opportunity

The mid-market presents a huge opportunity for the reseller community – a large installed base of 68 million PCs and 48 million servers, pressure to do more with less, and the need to compete on a level playing ground with organisations much larger than themselves. All these factors are pushing mid-market businesses to be more aware of the IT solutions available and how they can use them to create competitive advantage.

With mid-market businesses spending over $162 billion on software and IT services a year, the market is currently expected to grow to $235 billon by 2009. This represents a great opportunity for your business in not only hardware and software revenue, but also services. Especially as the average life of a mid-market IT manger is a fairly tough one. Operating in silos, focused on keeping the infrastructure up and running or trying to keep pace with the flow of new mandates, government regulations and compliance needs, they tend to rely heavily on their relationships with their supplier partners to support them and keep them up to date with new technologies.

A Microsoft sponsored study in 2005, showed that mid-sized businesses with enhanced IT capabilities achieved a higher sustained revenue growth than their peers, indicating that profitable revenue growth is directly correlated to IT capabilities.

The study also highlighted that those companies grew at an average of 28.4% faster than their competitors with low IT capabilities, which proves that while mid-sized organisations are faced with difficult challenges, those that overcome them ultimately benefit in the long run through improved and sustained revenue growth.

Our mid-market guide aims to give an insight into the opportunity that the mid-market presents, and offers some helpful pointers on what pain points and drivers are forcing change within mid-sized businesses and how Microsoft solutions can help ease those pressures.