Cisco out on top for vendor short lists, internal study finds
With September IT Priorities data collected and analyzed, we finally added third quarter results to our vendor deliberations study and discovered that across all IT categories in our taxonomy, Cisco received the greatest proportion of “prefer” (84%) votes to “avoid” (16%) among all named vendors (open text responses) over the last four quarters. Microsoft came in second place with an average of 65% preferred responses among those respondents who listed the vendor as compared to 35% who are avoiding the software giant.
Other large vendors with a robust showing of counts had a more balanced spread of preferred versus avoid counts. These would include Avaya (61%/39%), Apple (49%/51%), Dell (64%/37%), Intel (51%/49%), HP (55%/45%), Oracle (61%/39%) and Sun (44%/56%). On the flipside, four times as many respondents who prefer Gateway are avoiding the vendor (20%/80%), making it the least preferred among IT professionals in our study.
Methodology
For this analysis, we looked at avoid and prefer responses across all IT categories over the last four quarters and coded 7318 total counts for “Prefer” and 4348 for “avoid”. The majority of these responses listed a myriad of vendors that do not belong to the top echelon of suppliers and vendors like Microsoft, Cisco, HP, IBM, and Sun. Other responses included consultants, VARs, none, and still evaluating.
About the IT Prioriites survey
Every 30 days, the ZDNet Research team selects a representative sample of 500 IT managers who work in organizations of more than 500 employees. The online survey asks the following questions:
1. Currently, what information technology project or implementation has the most resources dedicated to it?
Project/implementation [open text]
Which vendor(s) if any, did you choose for this project/implementation? [open text]
Which other vendor(s) had also been considered for the project/implementation? [open text]
2. What is the most important technology initiative your IT organization plans to implement over the next 12 months?
Technology initiative [open text]
Which IT vendor(s) do you believe has the winning solution in this area? [open text]
Which IT vendor(s) would you prefer to avoid for this solution? [open text]
3. What technology trend do you believe will most affect your IT environment in the next 18-24 months?
Technology trend [open text]
Is there a major vendor(s) in this area you would most likely work with for your solution? [open text]
Is there a major vendor(s) in this area you would least likely work with for your solution? [open text]
The roughly 4,500 free-form answers are then hand-coded independently by research analysts and mapped to our comprehensive taxonomy of enterprise IT categories. From there, the data are analyzed for statistical differences among items in the responses and across months. Several inferential statistics are calculated to confirm the robustness of the underlying trends. These data are then coded against the ZDNet taxonomy, which contains 80 technology subcategories ranging from application interface tools to wireless security.