If you serve the mid-market and you read only one channel story from across the Atlantic this year, make it the one now unfolding a year on from WWT’s acquisition of Softchoice.
In the US press, Jim Kavanaugh and Softchoice’s Andrew Caprara have been talking synergies – a surging Microsoft practice, a hiring push, and roughly 50 per cent growth on the Softchoice side as they scale WWT’s enterprise playbook into the mid-market and SMB. Kavanaugh was refreshingly blunt about why he bought rather than built: the mid-market was a big segment WWT had never really chased and had no instinct for, so instead of inventing that muscle it acquired it. A business now heading toward $25bn bought its way down-market.
Read that as a UK partner and it should land close to home. A giant has deliberately come down into a segment that used to be yours by default – and it is bringing enterprise-grade labs, deep technical benches and AI capability with it. Kavanaugh has also signalled that the next deals could add geographic capability to expand globally.
Down-market, then global: that is the stated direction of travel, and mid-market players on this side of the Atlantic – along with the tier-two VARs on the other – are in its path.
Here is the part the scale story misses. The mid-market client’s needs are quietly going global. Mid-sized companies now run people, offices and equipment across a dozen countries without the volume to command a global service – and “global,” for anything physical, is the hard problem. The internet flattened the world for bits: software, cloud, information all went borderless. It never flattened it for atoms. Import compliance, tax at the point of consumption, in-country billing, warranty and support – none of that dissolved. The fabric commoditised; the friction around it did not.
And that friction is structural, which is why scale alone doesn’t dissolve it. A giant can ship a box anywhere on earth; accounting for the sale where it holds no entity, and delivering support where it has no people, is another matter entirely. It is exactly why even WWT is shopping for geographic capability rather than assuming its size confers it.
The mid-market reach it just bought is North American. Genuine global execution for a mid-market client is not built yet – by them, or by most of the field.
So the battle that is emerging is not really about scale. It is about who can serve the global mid-market client – and for a UK partner it cuts both ways. The threat: as your client globalises, a scaled player who can deliver everywhere takes an account you have held for years. The opportunity: that capability doesn’t exist off the shelf, so the partner who can genuinely execute across borders can defend the base and win beyond it – precisely where the giants are thinnest.
None of which makes the answer easy, and I won’t pretend it does. To hold a globalising mid-market client you need cross-border execution, and there are only three ways to get it: build it – a decade of entities and hard-won compliance; rent it – partner with someone who already has it; or own it – buy it in. Every serious mid-market player will have to choose, and soon, because the clock started the moment Kavanaugh’s team put a pin in the mid-market map.
The mid-market stopped being local a long time ago. The US has just fired the starting gun on the fight for the global version of it, and it will not stay a US story for long. The border is the ground this gets fought on – and the partners who treat it as the prize, rather than a cost to be squeezed, are the ones who will still own their clients in ten years.
Dino Cooper
Dino Cooper has spent thirty years in cross-border technology and is CEO of Viadex
