State Of Midmarket IT For 2025, From AI To The Economy: Gartner
Midmarket IT executives share their thoughts on the economy, their priorities for the year, how they are connecting with executive management, their use of AI, and more.
(Paul Furtado, vice president, analyst, midsize enterprise security, Gartner, on stage at the MES Spring Summit)
From the booming AI market to economic concerns and communication with executive leadership, a new survey from research firm Gartner delved into the most pressing issues concerning midmarket IT.
The results of the 2025 Spring Midsize Enterprise Summit End User Survey were revealed at the MES Spring Summit held in Orlando, Fla., this week.
The survey results were shared by Paul Furtado, Gartner’s vice president, analyst, midsize enterprise security.
Here are some key takeaways Furtado shared from the survey, which included responses from over 500 CIOs, as well as other IT leaders and tech professionals.
- Despite current economic turbulence, including recent stock market dips, most midmarket IT leaders (44 percent) said they had “cautious optimism” with “mild uncertainty” and hopes for “moderate growth” about the economy.
- Midmarket leaders said their current three topmost organizational priorities are improving productivity and efficiency, growing revenue, and reducing costs.
- When it comes to feedback from executive leadership, midsize CIOs are doing “extremely well,” Furtado said, and that most CIOs (75 percent) were praised by executive management for keeping aligned with the organization’s objectives.
- A slight majority of midmarket IT leaders said they were currently not developing apps internally, instead opting for third-party apps (33 percent). However, 29 percent said most of their app development was done in house.
- The top three uses cases for AI by midmarket IT, according to the survey: data analytics, automating repetitive tasks, and improving customer experience. Furtado pointed out, interestingly, that the top uses for AI did not involve genAI, rather, traditional AL/ML and in other cases, robotics process automation.
- Midmarket leaders (80 percent) cited Azure as their preferred cloud provider. Furtado cautioned not reading into that statistic as some unwavering loyalty to Microsoft, rather more as IT leaders’ desire to stick with a single vendor, and because much of the midmarket world “is married to Microsoft,” he said.
- As for midmarket IT’s biggest challenges? IT leaders said security, risk, and compliance were the top issues.
- While AI wasn’t cited by IT leaders as a huge challenge or threat to IT operations, midmarket IT leaders had some thoughts on the technology. First, a perhaps surprising 48 percent of IT leaders said that they already have a formal AI use policy in place. They also said that their top concerns with AI are around data readiness, accuracy, reliability, and transparency.
- Additionally, 80 percent of midmarket CIOs reported having a formal security incident response plan in place. Their greatest security concerns, they said, involved training end users about phishing and SPAM, and managing shadow IT.
- But one of the biggest pain points IT leaders reported was cloud spend. Monitoring, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting cloud costs all topped IT leaders' list of concerns related to cloud providers.
Other Important Issues IT Leaders Noted
Furtado said that the survey results revealed other important topics for midmarket IT leaders including migrating away from VMWare, and successfully communicating with IT leadership and the board.
Three midmarket IT leaders took to the stage to share their real word experiences on these issues: Jack Thompson, head of information security at the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts; Blaine Carter, CIO at FranklinCovey; and Mary Wyderski, CIO at Network Services Company.
Thompson spoke about leading his team’s shift to a proactive security posture. He said the main goal was to get into a “stance where we don't have to be one step behind the threat actors.”
That goal, “led us into kind of shifting from the EDR [endpoint detection and response] space into that endpoint protection platform space,” he said.
ThreatLocker was their vendor pick for endpoint protection, Thompson said. With the solution, he said, “I sleep a little easier at night knowing that we can block things right out the gate.”
Carter also weighed in on one of his team’s biggest challenges: migrating from VMware.
“When we started seeing the amount of reliance we had on VMware ... we said we don’t want that. So, we actually started looking at diversification,” he said.
A combination of AWS and Azure is what worked for his organization, he said.
“We like to keep multiple channel providers,” Carter said, noting that doing so helps keep their pricing competitive and that “you don’t want to get too far into one camp,” as far as sticking with just one vendor solution.
Wyderski spoke about how her team leverages AI to drive sales growth.
With AI, “people are going to be able to do their jobs, write emails better, but not necessarily reduce head count,” she told the audience.
She and her team started thinking how they could leverage AI to help their sales growth.
“We took a look very carefully at our sales process and tried to figure out where there were inefficiencies,” Wyderski said.
“We worked with Salesforce and our sales team to optimize the sales process.” Doing so included using the social automation offered by Salesforce Einstein, the CRM giant’s AI platform, she said.
“We were able to convert those [sales] leads,” she added. “We looked at Einstein forecasting to help us use AI to improve our accuracy.”
Furtado also had some advice for vendors that serve the midmarket: “[The midmarket doesn’t] have really big teams, so the tools we need have to be effective and they have to be right-sized for our organization, but provide us the road map of the path forward as the business changes and grows. We ask, who are the most Innovative vendors right now?” he said about Gartner’s mission for the midmarket.