The mid-market has always been a huge prospect for managed service providers (MSPs) and companies in this range are in many ways a perfect fit for a number of the specialized services MSPs are offering. Selling managed services to the mid-market is a unique endeavor, however, and service providers must be mindful of the very distinct goals and requirements of this business segment before starting.

There's been a lot of talk about the mid-market recently, with IBM's (News - Alert) strategy being one of the bigger news announcements. The computing bigwig, which had previously viewed MSPs and outsourced service providers as competitors, has launched a full-scale strategy to partner with MSPs and cloud service providers while specifically targeting the mid-market segment.

IBM's Midmarket Application Framework strategy is designed to educate the company's prospective partners on the benefits of partnering with them to develop and market differentiated managed services. The company's research shows that mid-market organizations, which typically have small IT staffs, are open and enthusiastic about contracting MSPs to handle some of their IT management burden. These mid-market prospects also indicate that they would prefer to work with trusted, local IT services firms, which is why IBM is reaching out to these players.

NetEnrich also announced this week that it has ramped off efforts to assist MSPs serving mid-market customers, particularly those running Microsoft (News - Alert) business applications. The company provides remote operations center (ROC) offerings that support Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange Server, Active Directory, mobile devices and virtualized infrastructure across both public and private clouds.

The company's NOC (News - Alert) and ROC services have been around for a while, but what is new is the strategy to package them specifically for MSPs targeting the mid-market. NetEnrich GM and Senior VP Justin Crotty sees a lot of promise in the mid-market sector, where the customer size is typically 150 to 1,000 seats.

“The mid-enterprise has application-heavy environments,” said Crotty. For this reason, NetEnrich has been moving away from a basic help-desk services model and toward a value proposition that aids MSPs in managing and maintaining all IT infrastructure from networking equipment to unified communications solutions to database-level networking.

MSPs are clearly paying close attention to the mid-market opportunity. But actually selling managed services to this group is a specialized prospect. To be successful, service providers must understand what makes the mid-market unique, what prospective clients in this group are looking for in an MSP, and how this segment purchases services differently from other sized segments.

MSPNEWS will be hosting a webinar next week that covers the specialized topic of "Selling Managed Services to the Mid-Market." Ted Roller, vice president of channel development at Intronis (News - Alert) and Charles Weaver, CEO and co-founder of the MSPAlliance will be presenting the specialized discussion and registration is free at the link above.