A year ago, we kicked off our annual Vendor Value survey with gloomy news: Value, reliability and customer loyalty were all down. This year, it seems most vendors heard the message and improved.

How they did it varied: Check Point Software's customers like the way it combined quality with lower costs; T-Mobile's clients say it became more responsive. But, bottom line, average scores rose year over year in nearly every category we track. That's much better than last year, when for every vendor that improved, three declined.

This is the fifth year CIO Insight has polled IT executives on how well their major vendors deliver business value, reliability and quality. Google appears on our list for the first time, and Adobe, No. 1 in our first Vendor Value survey, in 2003, appears on the list again. While Adobe ranked 12th this year, Google took second place, tying with Hewlett-Packard and VeriSign. This year's No. 1 vendor: open source software vendor Red Hat, which earned a remarkable 97 percent loyalty rating.

A two-or three-point average rise in nearly all seven categories, coupled with a four-point boost in the average customer loyalty score, is a big step in the right direction. But it's not a breakthrough. All but the loyalty ratings remain in the same three- or four-point range as they did in our earlier surveys. And only 22 of the 38 vendors in our survey can claim that more than 66 percent of their customers give them good or excellent grades for overall value. That's far too many disappointed customers.

So thanks, vendors, for making up lost ground. But don't stop yet.

*Percentage of IT executives rating vendor as excellent or good.

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