Analyst: You said off-recording that the consolidation story is real but everyone's got the mechanism wrong. Say more.
Expert: Yeah. The framing from the sell side and the research houses is platform vendors swallowing point products. Big fish, little fish. That's the outcome. The cause is backwards. The buyer changed before the product did. The bundled security stuff didn't suddenly get good in 2024, it got adequate in about half the places it needed to be. What moved was procurement deciding the contract count was itself the number.
Analyst: Contracts, not capability.
Expert: Correct. I'd sit in customer reviews where their own slide had a count on it. Security vendors: seven. Target: three. That's the whole slide. Nobody in that room could tell you what all seven did. I asked once, genuinely asked, and got a shrug. Once that's the goal you're not selling against an endpoint product, you're selling against a headcount reduction in vendor management.
Analyst: Boundaries of the segment as you ran it — everybody means something different by mid-market and I need to know what I'm writing down.
Expert: For us, ninety million to a billion in revenue, euros. Seven hundred seats at the bottom, eight thousand at the top. Three, four years back they're running endpoint, a log product, identity, email security, vulnerability scanning, and something somebody bought at a conference and never switched off. So six. Seven with the conference thing, which I count, because it still renews.
Analyst: And the expectation on the bundled side was parity?
Expert: No. Nobody expected parity. Write that bit down. The number that came back at us, over and over, was two thirds. We accept yours is better, the bundled thing does two thirds, two thirds is fine at that price. One procurement lead put it in a requirements document. Sixty-five per cent of best-of-breed capability against a contract value reduction of thirty-two. In writing. I kept a photo of it.
Analyst: Who's making that call? The security lead?
Expert: Usually not.
Analyst: That's the whole answer?
Expert: Sorry, no. It's the thing I'd tell anyone selling into that segment, I just find it depressing. The person who kills your deal owns the enterprise agreement with the platform vendor and is not on your call sheet. Procurement. Or the head of infrastructure. They've got a renewal coming on a licence covering eleven, twelve other things and your product is a rounding error inside a negotiation you aren't in.
Analyst: Surely security has a veto.
Expert: In the very large accounts, yes. In mid-market the security lead has usually got a second job as well, reports into the IT director, no line to the board. We won the technical evaluation and lost the purchase order eleven times in 2024 that I can name. Eleven. After the sixth or seventh I stopped sending engineers to bake-offs, which was correct commercially and was also the week I started answering recruiters.