Cisco, Dell, HP: top vendor picks for planned initiatives

When ZDNet Research asks 500 IT professionals (like you) each month where they're allocating their resources, we take the opportunity to ask questions about IT vendor preferences and the reasons why. If you're familiar with the survey, one of the questions we ask is "What is the most important technology initiative your IT organization plans to implement over the next 12 months?”  Followed by: "Which IT vendor(s) do you believe has the winning solution in this area?", plus: "Why do you feel this vendor(s) has the winning solution?"

The May data is in and we took a look at the responses to these questions and will share a slice of it with you. For simplicity, we'll look at the top listed vendor(s) in three popular hardware categories; desktops, servers, and telephony. 

Among those that listed "desktops" as the most important 12-month initiative, Dell received the most votes (60%). Here are some of the original, unedited responses for why they chose Dell (maybe some of which are your own!):
Best deal for us
Contractual obligation
Has best package offerings
Past experience with vendor
Quality options and price incentive; and quality product at a low price

For desktops, no other vendor with more than a single vote was observed in the data.

Among those respondents that listed "servers" as the most important 12-month initiative, HP received the most show of hands as the choice vendor (16.7%). The responses:
Better job in the past for us
Compaq standards
Proven Customer Service and Quality
Sole supplier
Vendor is part current platform strategy

Here Dell came in second place (13%), some of the reponses: 
Price and Availability
Quality
This is a continuation of their products already installed on site
Works no and has worked reliably for 10 years

On the networking front, telephony is a top initiative and among the respondents who listed it as such, 30% chose Cisco as the superior vendor. Here's why:                                                                                         Aligns with current infrastructure architecture
Cisco created the compression stuff and made it affordable with Linksys, coupled with Vonage             
Decentralized control; Excellent support Excellent Service, It Works
Experience
Foot print reputation
Still sorting things out
They have a reasonably good amount of experience in this area
We are already a Cisco shop
VoIP performance in tests
We switched to cisco network gear and will be more compatable and easier to implement

3Com and Sprint came in second place with each equally mentioned (6%) as choice vendors for telephony.

What do you think? Would you agree with your peers' opinions? If your future IT plans include hardware upgrades which vendor(s) will you pick and why?  Tell us in Talkback.

Note: Keep in mind we also ask respondents which vendors they'll avoid, something we'll take at in a future post.