Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Rahul Pahuja · CData · August 2026
Connectivity gets found at the bottom of a company and bought at the top. The engineer who needs a driver this week and the executive who signs a governed access layer for the whole business are rarely the same person, and they are never reached the same way. This map is about the second one: which US segments those buyers sit in, who signs, and roughly how many there are. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Software and platform vendors
The companies that ship connectivity inside their own product rather than build it themselves. The decision is made once, it sits in a roadmap, and it holds for years, which makes this the slowest segment to open and the hardest one to lose.
Who signs: chief product officer, VP of engineering, head of platform or integrations, CTO. At smaller vendors, the founder.
8,000 to 9,000
US employers registered as software publishers; roughly 1,500 to 2,000 of them carry 250 or more people on the plan
Health systems, payers and life sciences
The sector where data access is a compliance decision before it is an engineering one, so the buying group is wider than it first looks and the security review is the real gate. Long cycles, and the work compounds once it lands.
Who signs: chief data officer, VP of data engineering, director of clinical or commercial analytics, and the security lead who can stop it.
6,000 to 6,500
US health care employers at 250 people or more, plus roughly 1,000 pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturers
Banks, insurers and asset managers
Every one of them runs a core system older than the warehouse it is now expected to feed. Reporting and reconciliation deadlines create the urgency, and the budget usually already sits in a modernization line rather than a new one.
Who signs: head of data platform, enterprise architect, VP of finance systems, chief information security officer.
5,500 to 6,500
US finance and insurance employers at 250 people or more
Manufacturers and distributors on large ERP
The least fashionable segment on this page and one of the most reachable. The system of record is old, the reporting requests never stop, and the technology team is small enough that one conversation settles the question.
Who signs: IT director, VP of business systems, the ERP program owner, finance director.
9,000 to 9,500
US manufacturing employers at 250 people or more, roughly 6,000 to 6,500 of them, plus roughly 3,000 wholesale distributors at the same size
Large employers building governed access for AI tools
A buying group that did not exist two years ago. It cuts across every segment above, it tends to be funded centrally, and it is often owned by someone whose title is less than a year old. Being early to a role is worth more than being early to a category.
Who signs: CIO, chief data officer, chief architect, head of AI platform, and the security officer who signs it off.
11,000 to 11,500
US employers at 1,000 people or more, the band where this is a funded program rather than a side project
Systems integrators and data consultancies
The channel rather than the customer. One practice lead can carry the same decision into a dozen accounts. They are rarely worked as a named audience because they do not sit inside any single sector code, so no list vendor sells them cleanly.
Who signs: practice lead, delivery director, head of data engineering, alliances or partnerships lead.
No clean public register
identified practice by practice; the difficulty is exactly why the segment stays open

Where the openings are

1
Discovery from the bottom reaches the engineer, not the person who signs. A driver an engineer finds on a Tuesday and a governed platform agreement a CIO signs in the fall are the same technology and two entirely different sales. The first arrives on its own. The second has to be gone and got, by name, before a procurement process exists.
2
The embedded buyer and the analytics buyer do not share a door. Connectivity sold into somebody else's product is a product and engineering decision at a software vendor. Connectivity sold for internal reporting is a data platform decision inside an end user. Self-serve discovery keeps returning to whichever door it already knows, and the other segment stays quiet rather than uninterested.
3
This gets bought at a moment, not on a cycle. A warehouse migration, an ERP replacement, a failed security review, a new access policy written for AI tools. Those moments are visible from outside if someone is watching several thousand companies for them. That watching is mechanical work, and it is the one job inbound discovery cannot do.
4
From the outside this reads as a distribution question, not a credibility one. Building connectivity is your discipline and nobody here would improve on it. What companies in this position usually lack is the machinery that puts the product in front of a few thousand named data and platform leaders who have never had a reason to look for it, on a schedule, with a record of what came back. That is the part we build, and we hand it over when it works.
Built from public registries covering US employers that file a benefit plan, current to the 2024 filing year. Counts are banded deliberately. Owner-only and very small employers are not published in this data, so these figures describe established companies with payroll rather than the whole market. Sector codes are self-reported. Integrator and channel populations are not enumerated in any public register and are described rather than counted.
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