The midmarket is growing up. After years of being the poor second cousin to enterprises in terms of attention from technology vendors, companies of 100 to 1,000 employees are more likely than ever to demand individualized attention from their vendors, eschewing resellers in the process.

That was the somewhat surprising finding from IDC’s new study, which interviewed more than 500 midsized companies about their preferences for vendor- and service-provider interaction. The study defined a service as anything within the IT lifecycle, from consulting to deployment and support.

The study found that about 50 percent of companies with 100 to 1,000 employees preferred services to be sold and delivered by the vendor; less than 30 percent preferred services sold by the vendor and delivered by a local firm; about 12 percent preferred services sold and delivered by a local firm; and only about 7 percent preferred services sold by a local firm and delivered by a vendor.

“Most of the time people think of the midmarket served by resellers, so when we asked them who they wanted to sell and deliver services to them, we were surprised that the biggest chunk said they want the technology vendor to provide the services, as opposed to the reseller,” said Rebecca Segal, a vice president at IDC and the study’s author.

Read the rest of this article on eWEEK.com.