Who are vendors? Are they salesmen, partners, consultants or service providers to CIOs?

We believe they are a bit of all. They are consultants when they are telling you about solutions to problems that you may be facing; they are salesmen when they push their boxes and services to you, they are partners when they implement their product in your organisation, and they are service providers when they fill loopholes in the implementation.

More than 180 CIOs contributed to this survey with inputs on what they bought last year, their satisfaction with the purchases and what they plan to invest in. According to that we have rated vendors in seven categories based on market share, satisfaction levels and brand equity. The categories are: Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Networking, Security, Storage, PC/Servers and  Virtualisation.

By Geetaj Channana

INSIDE

1) Business Intelligence
2) Cloud Computing
3) Networking
4) Security
5) Storage
6) PC/ Servers
7) Virtualisation

ORACLE WINS A TOUGH RACE

Users prefer Oracle BI over SAS and IBM in customer satisfaction.

The businesses are growing complex and so is their reach. They are crossing borders and continents and becoming truly global in nature. The competition is red hot too in this global environment. On top of that there are cost pressures.

BI tools, at least try to, link business and technology to ensure the organisations are competitive in the market. Working more like decision support systems, they make use of data mining, predictive analysis and other tools to aid business leaders.

But this, still remains a niche area of investment for companies and they rely mostly on their ERP vendors to provide such tools. This resonates in our results too. Most respondents (44%) have bought business intelligence offerings from SAP, but the satisfaction levels are higher in products from Oracle (71%) and IBM (69%). More people are also inclined towards specialised offerings from Oracle (24%) and IBM (23%).

This certainly implies that specialised offerings are more benefcial but are more diffcult to implement on proprietary systems. Also, especially in the case of BI, it is important to have the correct result matrices in place. You must know what you want the system to fnd for you and how it can be plugged into your current systems.

Anil Bhatia
Senior Group Manager, ICT Greater China & South Asia, Japan & Korea Regions, S T Microelectronics

MICROSOFT – ALL IN THE CLOUD

But Salesforce.com leads the customer satisfaction index.

Some say it is a new name being given to services that have been available. Others say that it is more hype than substance. There are concerns about security and standards on the cloud, but that is not stopping vendors from pushing it more and more.

Many technology vendors have cloud based offerings. Some are talking of private clouds, while others are bullish on public clouds. The buy-in from CIOs is though not very promising. Only 45 out of approximately 180 respondents actually made an investment on the cloud in the last one year. Thus, we would take these results with a pinch of salt. They are more indicative than conclusive.

Microsoft rules the roost with their cloud offering in the last one year with 38% of all users, who bought cloud services, opting for Microsoft. But, Sales force leads the customer satisfaction index for the group who have voted. Nine out of 10 people who bought Sales force were "very satisfied" with the service. But, more people are looking at Google as their cloud partner in the coming year. 34% of people who did not buy Google services are gearing up to invest with them in the coming year.

What the data indicates is the market is pretty confused with the solutions on offer. They know the solution well, but do not know how can it plug into their organizations and benefit them. The concerns regarding standards and security are keeping organizations from opting for the cloud.

Suresh A Shanmugam
Head - Business Information Technology Solutions (BIS), Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Limited

CISCO CONNECTS THE NETWORKS

No close opponent to challenge the supremacy of the networking czar.

How irritating is it to hear from a customer support executive who says he cannot help you out because their network is down? It is very easy to lose customers due to bad infrastructure. A weak network can result in poor overall reliability of the IT infrastructure and can directly affect the productivity of the systems, as well as employees.

Networks are like the veins and arteries of the body. It is necessary to ensure that communication does not stop in the 24x7 environment. Also, as with security, storage and virtualization, networking is a specialist’s job.

It is extremely important to have a secure and robust network to ensure smooth functioning of all application and devices in the organization’s IT infrastructure. It is not only important to have a good product, it is also necessary to have a good management console that provides control even in a heterogeneous environment.

Cisco provides all these features, and more. It is a winner on all three counts in our survey — market share, satisfaction and brand equity. 76% of all customers, who bought networking products, chose Cisco. A distant second was D-Link with a  score of 39%.

On satisfaction, 87% of all Cisco customers were "very satisfied" with their products. D-link, which was second on sales, had 57% "very satisfied" customers.  On brand equity Cisco is again on the top with a score of 33%.

Upal Chakraborty
CIO, DLF Limited.

BIG THREE RUN NECK & NECK

A close fght between the top three server vendors reveals a lot.

PCs and servers are the most common purchases that all organisations make, almost every year. Eighty-six percent of all respondents have bought these products for their organisations in the last one year.

Sixty eight percent of all respondents bought HP products, closely followed by IBM with 65%. To clarify — a total of more than 100% in the scores — companies bought products from more than one vendor in a year.

On the satisfaction front, IBM came up trumps with 73% respondents were "very satisfed" with their purchases. HP, on the other hand had only 52% of their customers were "very satisfed" . The surprising statistic though was that 23% of all respondents, who did not buy any products in the past year, were willing to buy Dell in the coming year.

Dell was closely followed by HP and IBM with 19% of respondents who had not bought their products in the past year, willing to buy them now.

Similar to the cloud, where we had three different brands coming up trumps on three measures – this category, too, has three winners. But, unlike the cloud, where there was a lot of confusion, the three different winners in this market signifed how there was no clear leader in the category and how cut-throat the competition was.

K.B. Singh
VP IT, BSES JV Reliance Infrastructure Ltd.

DIAL SYMANTEC FOR SECURITY

Leads the pack by a great margin on all fronts.

How important is security in organizations? It’s a no brainer. Many organizations have specialists Chief Security Officers and we also have a special supplement with this magazine for these professionals. The importance of security got reflected in all parts of our survey. Forty-nine percent of all respondents were interested in security products and 41% were looking at buying them in the coming year.

But, when it came to products and vendors the experts ruled the stage in security. Symantec was the clear winner in this category with 63% of all respondents opting for their products. A distant second was McAfee with 38% of respondents buying their products. In terms of satisfaction, Symantec was on top again with 71% of all buyers claiming to Beverly satisfied with their purchase.

In terms of brand equity, Symantec was the winner again with 29% of all users, who did not buy products, interested in buying them in the next year. But, McAfee was not far behind with a score of 25%. Microsoft, which is a relatively new player in this category, scored 14% on brand equity, with a satisfaction index of 22%. This clearly signified that Microsoft needs to tighten its screws if it wants to compete.

Japjit Singh Sandhu
Vice President - Information Security, VFS Global Services Pvt Ltd.

EMC ON TOP FOR SATISFACTION, BRAND RECALL

HP’s high market share doesn’t deter the reputation of information expert.

This is such an important part of technology that it is taken for granted at times. To put things into perspective on the importance of storage — mankind generated 5 million Terabytes of data from its origin till 2003. It grew 100 times by the year 2008 to 511 million Terabytes and doubled again to 1 billion Terabytes by 2009. This means we create the amount of data created from mankind’s origin till 2003, in every two days in the current scenario.

All this puts a lot of pressure on storage mediums. From all our respondents who bought storage products in the past year,  HP was their first choice – with 38% opting for its products. But, EMC has the best satisfaction scores, with 82% "very satisfied" customers. EMC is also the company that has the best brand equity among all players, with 37% of all customers who have not bought EMC products, interested in buying it in the next one year.

This again signifies the importance of experts in this area. EMC being an expert, holds a lot of respect in the CIO’s mind, but does not sell as much as some of the other vendors.

Atul Luthra
Head IT, PVR Limited

IF IT’S VIRTUALISATION, IT’S VMWARE

Most customers strongly consider buying it in the next year too.

Has it been a buzz word or what? Vendors have projected it as one of the biggest revelations of all times. A lot of new investments in the server buying space have been driven by virtualization. It has become more important since public and private clouds have been introduced.

Companies have saved millions in capital expenditure, operating costs, energy and real estate by virtualising their servers. Though some claim that management costs can be high, the technology is still wooing a lot of CIOs, who think that its benefits outweigh the tradeoffs.

It is also one of the few technologies that the CIOs are interested in and have it in their investment priorities. Thirty-eight percent of CIOs are interested in virtualization and 35% have it as their investment priority.

While virtualization has grown in importance in businesses, there has been one company that has remained an undisputed leader in this space — VMware. It has gone through its own ups, downs and acquisitions, but has continued to be the top choice of the Fortune 100 companies.

The same got reflected in our survey. Most respondents who bought VMware (59%), were very satisfied with it (79%) and out of those who did not buy it, 42% admitted that they strongly considered buying it in the next year itself. Next to VMware was Microsoft. Out of all respondents who bought Virtualization products, 32% bought Microsoft, and 42% were very satisfied with their purchase. 21% would strongly consider buying Microsoft products in the coming year.

S.S. Mathur
GM-IT, Centre for Railway Information Systems.