Everybody wants to sell something to the mid-market IT execs.

Vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP have re-launched their mid-market initiatives so many times, I've long since lost count.

But mid-market IT executives continue to be tough to reach, according to a survey of 200 of them that was commissioned by tech distributor Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions. And that was before the current hysteria about the economy. Let's not go there.

Defining the mid-market as between 500 and 3000 employees, the survey offered up a few interesting tidbits for vendors that think they know how to reach this market:

They listen to everybody, but not too much. Thirty-one percent listen to peer companies (good for the mid-market community programs out there) -- and it drops off from there: 30 percent pay attention to magazines and journals and only 29 percent listen to either IT consulting firms or analyst firms. Sixteen percent listen to local resellers, and 15 percent listen to large IT consultants. (That last is probably good, because they probably can't afford them.)

Can't someone help them with security? Seventy-eight percent said information security was the most important issue. Other top issues include reducing costs (whew, and that is before the meltdown); improving customer service, and managing growth.

First organize -- then protect -- their data. Ironically, 55 percent said their next initiative would be in the data management area, ahead of the 46 percent that mentioned information security. This isn't too surprising, however, since the former implies that companies are in that size band where (unless they were extremely far-sighted at the very beginning) their data stores are fragmented, data definitions are all over the map, and users can't get the information they need.