Midsize Businesses—A Prime Audience for Technology
Considering themselves the “earliest adopters” of new IT solutions, midsize companies have interest in a range of technologies, from CRM to virtualization.
By Hailey Lynne McKeefry
Midsize businesses are a prime audience for new technologies, especially those that can be traced to clear and specific business benefits. 
In fact, more than half of all midsize companies consider themselves “earliest adopters” of new IT solutions, compared with only 36 percent of small organizations, according to a CompTIA study released in April 2010.
“Almost always, bigger companies will get up to speed more quickly on things and be willing to try them if there is a business benefit,” says Laurie McCabe, partner at SMB Group Inc. “They are well past trying technology for technology sake, but given the business case, the bigger the company, the more likely they are to adopt new technologies.”
These midsize firms are significantly more likely than their smaller counterparts to use or be planning to implement a broad variety of technologies, including desktop virtualization, server/storage resource virtualization, third-party hosted productivity applications, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, Web services, radio frequency identification (RFID), enterprise resource planning (ERP), managed storage services, mobile computing, storage optimization, and converged voice/data solutions, the CompTIA study found.
In many cases, these companies want to extend their technology adoption, particularly in the area of hosted services. In 2009, for example, only 4 percent of midsize businesses reported that they were planning to adopt third-party hosted email, a figure that jumped to 24 percent for 2010. While only 7 percent of midsize businesses reported plans to use hosted accounting and financial applications in 2009, 34 percent are planning to start using them in 2010. †
