IT managers: Yes to Cisco, No to IBM

In the battle of IT vendors, Cisco is consistently favored more than avoided, while on balance, more planners will avoid IBM than will choose Big Blue. How do we know? For the past several months, as part of our IT Priorities study, we've been asking IT decision-makers which vendors they will use in their upcoming projects and which ones they will avoid. While some of our study participants are still evaluating which vendors to choose and some will be developing in-house solutions, most told us exactly which vendors were getting the green light and which were not. And while we are still applying a broad brush to these preliminary data, with over 1,200 data points definite trends are emerging.

The chart below shows how the leading vendors named by our IT decision makers stack up when it comes to solution planning for next year's IT initiatives. As you can see, for most vendors it's pretty much a wash, but Cisco definitely has more votes in the plus column, primarily for wireless and remote access networking projects. IBM takes the biggest hit, principally in servers, with somewhat less avoidance in their Web technology segment. We'll continue to collect these data and report on other trends as they become evident.