The Current State Of Midmarket IT—Fall 2025

The survey results show the top challenges and priorities right now for midmarket IT leaders.

For IT leaders at midmarket organizations, security, AI and looking for Broadcom-VMware alternatives are some of the most pressing challenges right now.

The results of the latest Midsize Enterprise Summit End User Survey conducted in collaboration with research firm Gartner reveal the major trends and top challenges among IT leaders right now.

The survey results were presented at the MES’ Midsize Enterprise Summit Fall 2025 held in San Antonio this week.

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The survey results were shared on stage by Mike Cisek, Gartner’s vice president analyst of infrastructure, operations and cloud, during his keynote presentation.

Hundreds of midmarket IT executives were surveyed. Here is what they had to say:

Budgeting

There has been a slight increase in interest in tech investment in the next 12 to 18 months (among 46 percent of IT executives surveyed).

“We know what’s happening in the space ... we always try to touch on what’s happening in the economy,” Cisek said.

Despite controversy over tariffs and a roiling political climate, there remains “a lot of optimism in the market,” Cisek said about the survey. “For the most part, people are increasing spend,” he said.

Broadcom-VMware

One of the biggest issues that IT midmarket leaders are still facing is fallout from Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.

The acquisition is “hitting this market,” Cisek said. Due to astronomical costs some organizations are dealing with after the acquisition resulted in VMware renewal prices that are multiples higher after Broadcom switched to a per-core subscription licensing model, midmarket IT is looking for alternative solutions. That means a look at hybrid environments.

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“We’re having a lot of people try and reconfigure what they’re doing again from a foundational layer,” Cisek said. “Not just of the outcomes they want, but to overcome the challenges they’ve experienced for years in terms of cost resilience, operational efficiency. The key point is only a small subset are going to be pure cloud or pure edge on-prem.”

Infrastructure

A significant percentage of midmarket IT leaders reported having a hybrid infrastructure (79 percent). The benefits of going hybrid they said were flexibility, the ability to align infrastructure to business objectives and proactive disaster recovery.

The top challenges of hybrid infrastructure for midmarket IT include containing costs across multiple environments, a lack of sufficient skills and expertise and integrating infrastructure components across multiple environments.

AI

Seventy percent of midmarket IT leaders said they currently use everyday AI tools for work and personal reasons.

The most use cases for AI are data analysis, automating repetitive tasks and improving the customer/user experience.

Still, most business use of AI remains quite limited.

Midmarket organizations are “using everyday AI solutions to do things like data aggregation and analysis and repetitive task automation, but it’s small scale ... it’s not game-changing transformation use cases,” Cisek told the audience.

Top challenges with AI for the midmarket? Ensuring data readiness, accuracy, reliability and transparency; mitigating risks; and integrating existing processes and legacy technology.

Security

The survey revealed the most-used security tools by midmarket organizations. They include:

The security tools that most midmarket organizations are lacking are breach attack simulation tools (77 percent).

Cisek left the audience with some words of advice. “You need to manage not just hype in terms of technology, but you need to set expectations in terms of innovation and leadership. If you don’t have a compelling vision from a leadership perspective, it’s going to make everything you’re going to try to do a lot more difficult.”