Our exclusive research finds which vendors are catering best to small- and medium-sized businesses.

Who Looks Out for Mid-Tier Firms?

HP, IBM and Symantec score with mid-tier companies, but many telecom firms play favorites with large customers. In an ideal world, vendors would provide terrific value and reliability to all their customers. But that's not how it works in the real world: some provide more value and better service to large accounts, while others shine at taking care of mid-sized and smaller companies. The differences can be large, and even troubling: Fewer than half of AT&T's mid-tier clients rate it as good or excellent at value and reliability, and Sun's customer loyalty among smaller firms is 14 points lower than at larger organizations. Hewlett Packard emerges as the top vendor for mid-tier companies; it's the only one to consistently score more than 80 percent for midtier firms. The companies that score most evenly across companies of all sizes: Microsoft and Cisco Systems.

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