The top challenges for IT departments in Midmarket businesses and how to overcome them

Monday, February 12, 2018Lauren Macdonald A midmarket business, as defined by Gartner, is an organization with less than $1 billion in annual revenue and between 100 and 1000 employees.

Today there are approximately 200,000 of these midsize organizations across North America and Europe, most of which have IT departments that face unique but often-related challenges.

IT departments for midsize organizations are typically:

• Limited in manpower
  • Roughly 60% of IT roles in the midmarket are collapsed and versatile by necessity due to under staffing
• Have finite IT Budgets
  • Usually between $5-$20 million annual budget
  • An average of 39% of total budget spent on personnel

But, they still need most, if not all, of the capabilities that a larger enterprise would need, just at a lesser scale.

IT budget-spending in the Midmarket

According to Gartner research, the top 3 technology areas where midsize organizations are currently spending the highest amount of their budgets are:

1. BI/Analytics
2. Cloud Services/Solutions
3. Cyber/Information Security

Other important technology areas where budget is sometimes spent are:

4. Infrastructure and Datacenter
5. Enterprise Resource Planning
6. Networking, Voice, and Data communications
7. Industry Specific Apps
8. Digitalization/Digital Marketing
9. Legacy Modernization
10. Mobility & Mobility Applications

Overcoming the challenges

IT departments in the midmarket are often challenged in the following ways:

• They’re lacking necessary IT skills
  • The biggest talent gaps in the midmarket for IT departments include security and risk, software developers, project managers, database administrators, information/analytics, business analysts, etc.
• They’re struggling to find affordable solutions
  • Midsize enterprises want IT solutions that fit within their financial means and available resources but struggle to find ones that are affordable
• They’re finding it challenging to keep up with new technologies
  • A finite budget and resistance to change from higher in the organization often makes it hard for IT departments in the midmarket to make the business case to upgrade platforms and technologies.

In order to overcome these challenges, IT departments need to find products and services that:

• Have low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Offer simplified pricing
• Are “right-sized” so that they pay only for what they need and use
• Have no surprise additional costs
• Have flexible deployment options
• Offer fewer integration headaches
• Are easy to install, configure, and maintain

How eBridge Connections’ iPaaS solution ‘fits the mold’ for midsize IT departments

Although eBridge Connections has some large enterprise clients and a few smaller start-up clients as well, the midmarket is what eBridge’s platform was designed and tailored towards.

eBridge’s iPaaS was created as a way for midsize organizations to cost-effectively integrate their disparate business systems in order to eliminate manual data entry and streamline information flow across platforms.

Here are some key features that make eBridge’s platform a winner for midsize IT departments:

• A platform that dynamically adjusts capacity to support varying transaction volumes
• A flexible pricing model (option for monthly recurring or one-time setup fee and annuals)
• Pre-built connectors that are easy to setup and configure
• Turnkey integration solutions that are easy to deploy and fully maintained in-house on the clients’ behalf
• An iPaaS solution that complements the existing IT team and requires no software developers on their end to install, configure, or maintain the solution
• A model that supports the typical midsize organizations’ pre-conceived notion that there is no budget for additional headcount, but a reliable software solution is doable if the investment makes sense.

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