Before becoming an analyst serving technology marketers and focusing on the organization and automation of marketing processes, I (Peter O'Neill) had the more traditional orientation of covering a specific market — IT management software (ITMS) in my case.  I remember being engaged with several ITMS vendors in the last months of that previous life discussing the same thing: how to address other market segments.  Many of them selling in the enterprise segment tended to be tempted into what they call the "midmarket," which is companies with 500 to 999 employees and is perhaps more enterprise-like than small-business-like, so it seems like a safer bet. Forrester names this the "medium-large" segment in our data reports. Some were even ambitious enough to consider the SMB segment.

I was always pretty clear in my recommendations on how to market to the midmarket or SMB segments if you’re an established enterprise software vendor: Develop segment-specific solutions; use a different brand if possible; and know your channels well. None of these things are easy though and, to be honest, most enterprise vendors take the easy way out. They merely:

·          Design some cut-down version of their enterprise products

·          Tweak their pricing model  but then worry obsessively about “cannibalizing” enterprise sales

·          Go looking for channel partners  but usually end up with the same ones from their enterprise segment

For this reason, enterprise software vendors that have failed miserably to scale down their products or sales channels litter the tech industry.