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For some specialists in the field of enterprise software, there is an instinctive distrust of such a loose phrase as the 'mid-market'. It is a term that has been used as a catch-all to lump together a whole range of businesses, with widely varying requirements, that do not conveniently fit into other neat categories.

Certainly, it is something of an arbitrary term; the European Union defines a small to medium enterprise as having 50-500 employees and sales under £200 million, but many may be larger or be a division of a larger group.

There are, nevertheless, some clear and important challenges facing all those companies implementing business applications. Certainly, all the major software vendors think so, and are attaching great importance to this market. All have now developed packages that they claim will meet the needs of customers in this category.

But what are these needs? These are explored in more detail over the following pages, but, speaking to these organisations, three broad characteristics emerge. First, these are businesses that rely on IT to streamline operating costs; second, they are unlikely to have huge IT budgets or large departments; and third, the choice of which business application to use is absolutely crucial.

While large organisations may be able to absorb the blow of an unsuccessful implementation, for the mid-sized organisation, a poor choice or poor implementation can be fatal. This alone makes this area worth examing in some detail.

Contents:

The big themes: Integrating modules; cost models; industry knowledge.

The business challenge: Mid-sized companies need sophisticated applications but have far fewer resources than larger organisations.

Mid-market futures: The technology gap between large and mid-market applications is widening - but mid-sized businesses need to be wary of cutting-edge deployments.

Suppliers: The key mid-market application vendors and their products.