How Optimised Innovators are getting ahead with the cloud.

What sets high-performing mid-market companies apart in 2025? New research from SoftwareOne identifies a select group of these businesses (for the purposes of the research, organisations with revenues between $500 million and $5 billion) that consistently outperform their peers.  

We’ve called these outliers 'Optimised Innovators'—and we’ve discovered that cloud (and the way they pay for it) is a big part of their success story. 

The mid-market cloud advantage 

The cloud. The flywheel.  
The foundations for success. 

In fact, by excelling at cloud adoption and automation, these mid-market leaders achieve a degree of competitive parity with enterprise organisations that benefit from much bigger budgets and larger teams. This enables them to innovate on almost equal terms, further driving the flywheel effect to create a virtuous cycle of continuous cost savings and investment. 

While as many as 67% of large enterprises report high levels of innovation, these mid-market success stories prove that size isn't everything. More than two-thirds of our mid-market sample have built cloud-based infrastructures of their own, while over half have moved their applications to the cloud and migrated core processes. They’re optimising costs—and investing for innovation on their own terms. 

The flywheel effect becomes clearly visible in the numbers. 46% of mid-market companies featured in our research found their software costs too high, with a similar percentage struggling with cloud expenses. Optimised Innovators turn this challenge into opportunity. Through methodical cloud optimisation, they consistently free up resources that fund new innovation projects. These investments then generate further efficiencies, creating sustainable growth. 

Their ambitions don’t stop there.  

Over the next two years, our research show these companies will further strengthen their cloud advantage through FinOps adoption and migrating further workloads to cloud: they're on track to run 70% of software applications and 56% of custom applications in the cloud.  

How does this process work in practice?   

Two companies show the way—and SoftwareOne is all-in on supporting them both. 

From foundations to results

The cloud foundations built by Optimised Innovators deliver tangible business benefits, underpinned by the flywheel of self-funding innovation. These advantages were powerfully apparent when SoftwareOne helped Bemol, Brazil's largest retail group in the Western Amazon, undertake a radical transformation encompassing cloud investment,  e-commerce, and AI intiatives.

Measuring the business impact 

These successful projects demonstrate a clear pattern: optimising cloud spending creates resources for innovation, which generates measurable improvements, leading to further opportunities for growth. Each improvement builds on the last, helping mid-market companies compete more effectively against their peers and even larger enterprises with bigger budgets. 

If that flywheel process becomes an established way of working, the potential for cloud-driven growth is frankly astounding—not just in the mid-market, but for organisations of almost every size. 

According to Goldman Sachs figures, cited in our own research, AI advances enabled by cloud computing could boost global GDP by 7% (almost $7 trillion) and increase productivity by 1.5% per year over the next decade. 

Optimised Innovators are already tracking the same trajectory in putting cloud-driven technologies to work for their businesses. Over the next two years, 95% will be in mid- or advanced implementation of traditional AI for customer interactions, compared with 71% today. Similarly, 83% of Optimised Innovators will be midway or advanced in their use of GenAI for customer interactions, compared with just 50% today. Over that period, Optimised Innovators will also shift their focus from internal to external initiatives as their flywheels gather momentum. 

This is only the start of how these pioneering organisations are capturing value from every aspect of cloud-based innovation, to benefit their business processes and gain an edge against competitors in the mid-market and enterprise arenas. 

Create your own cloud success story - with SoftwareOne 

1. Start with the “why”: look at the technology as a tool to achieve clearly-defined business objectives
2. Assess current cloud maturity and identify optimisation opportunities
3. Create a clear cloud strategy aligned with the business objectives identified in Step 1
4. Implement robust governance and security frameworks
5. Build internal capabilities while leveraging external expertise

SoftwareOne can help with each of these steps.

Our services include cloud readiness assessments, migration planning, cost optimisation analysis and ongoing managed services. We work closely with clients to ensure their cloud investments deliver measurable business value, and we’re vendor agnostic—so our focus is firmly on client requirements.