Gartner Glossary

Midsize Enterprise (mse)

Gartner defines midsize enterprise (MSE) as those organizations that have between $50 million and $1 billion in annual revenues and/or 100 to 1000 employees. This is a vendor driven segmentation scheme and segmenting midsize enterprises by revenues or number of employees is arbitrary. Midsize enterprise is a term essentially born out of a process of elimination — it refers to the organizations that are neither Global 2000 enterprises nor small businesses.

Midsize enterprises are bound not so much by a similar set of IT needs, but by a similar set of challenges — most notably, limitations in IT staffing, skills and funding. The cross-industry average for IT full-time equivalents, as a percent of employees is 5.9% for midsize enterprises. This usually equates to between 10 and 50 internal IT staffers. On average, midsize enterprises spend approximately 4.5% of their annual revenue on IT. In absolute terms, this usually equates to IT budgets between $5 million – $25 million (see IT Key Metrics Data 2018: Midsize Enterprise Executive Summary). For metrics by revenues ranges less than $250 million in revenue, between $250 million and $500 million in revenue, and between $500 million and $1 billion in revenue, see IT Key Metrics Data 2018: Key Industry Measures: Cross Industry Analysis: Current Year

Standard terminology for defining midsize enterprise at Gartner:

• Midsize enterprise (CIOs in midsize enterprises)
• Midsize organization (security leaders in midsize organizations)
• Midmarket – to describe the collective group of midsize enterprises (midmarket CIOs …)
• MSE – acronym (MSE I&O leaders)