When it comes to emerging technologies, the conventional wisdom of the day has always been that midmarket companies are laggards. But a new study from CIO Insight shows otherwise.
When it comes to emerging technologies, the conventional wisdom of the day has always been that midmarket companies are laggards. The general rationale behind that thinking has been that small companies are more likely to embrace new technology because they have the freedom to do so while larger companies have the budget capacity to take a flier on something that may not work out.
In contrast, midmarket companies are generally assumed to be more cautious when it comes to emerging technology because they don’t want to make a mistake. But now word comes of a new study from CIO Insight, a sister publication of eWEEK, that shows that interest in emerging technologies such as storage virtualization, SOA (service-oriented architecture), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and X M L) and rich Internet applications is a lot higher than most people might initially suspect.
What seems to be driving this is that midmarket companies in general are developing a greater appreciation for the strategic advantages that can be derived from emerging technologies, especially when they have to compete aggressively against comparatively well-heeled Global 2000 competitors.
This doesn’t mean they are willing to invest in every bleeding-edge technology that comes down the pike. But it does mean that there is a lot more interest in leveraging cutting-edge technologies to create or alter business processes before larger competitors can implement the same technologies.
After all, it can take the average Global 2000 company two years of meetings and testing before they are actually able to put a new technology in place, much less derive any real return on investment from it. The people at a midmarket company usually have a lot bigger sense of compelling self-interest due to the threat of impending doom that is usually associated with competing with a bigger rival. As a result, they tend to be more attuned to looking for the idea that can help change the nature of the battle so the odds are more in their favor.
This willingness to embrace emerging technologies is the very thing that is starting to get a lot of the more adventurous people in IT to choose working for a midmarket company over a larger company. They may not have the same levels of budget set aside for IT, but the intangible rewards of using their IT skills to make a significant difference to the business more than outweighs the benefits of working within a larger IT organization. In addition, the political headaches associated with trying to actually get something done are usually a whole lot fewer in the smaller organization.
At the end of the day it’s never really about the technology itself. It really is about what you do with the technology and right now there is a growing sense that midmarket companies are doing a lot more with emerging technologies than their bigger cousins. And as that trend continues it should come as no surprise when more of these midmarket companies start to knock their bigger rivals around not because they are necessarily stronger, but rather because they have become more flexible and faster to punch.
