What do you value most about your information technology vendors? There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Every enterprise has key performance metrics unique to its corporate culture and the industry it serves. However, over the course of more than five years spent examining how enterprises rate the value of their IT vendors, we’ve identified several universal factors that every organization must take into consideration in its vendor relationships.
In July and August 2010, 684 IT decision-makers at U.S.-based enterprises responded to CIO Insight’s 2010 Vendor Value survey, designed, fielded and tabulated by Ziff Davis Enterprise Research. Of these respondents, 258 were from companies with at least 50 but fewer than 500 employees; 218 had at least 500 but fewer than 5,000 employees; and 208 had 5,000 employees or more.
We asked respondents to rate the vendors they work with on eight measures. The first four of these are classified as “value” measures:
- helping their customers increase revenue
- helping them lower costs
- ability to solve specific business problems
- delivery of appropriate service or support levels (new this year).
In addition, we asked respondents to rate their vendors on these three “reliability” measures:
- product quality
- delivery on time and within budget
- ability to meet whatever service-level agreements are in place (new this year).
Lastly, we asked respondents: If you had a choice, would you continue to work with this vendor? For the purposes of this report, results in each category indicate the percent of respondents who rate a vendor as excellent or good in that category. Vendors are also ranked on their overall scores across all categories. Download a PDF of the complete CIO Insight 2010 Vendor Value Ratings.
Based on those overall results, we see significant movement in the 2010 top-five vendor value rankings. In fact, only one vendor, Red Hat, kept a spot in the top five in both 2010 and 2009. The five firms leading the 2010 rankings in overall value and reliability ratings are:
- WebEx: a Web conferencing and collaboration solutions provider, and a division of Cisco
- Cisco: a networking solutions provider
- NetApp: a storage system and software vendor
- Juniper Networks: a provider of network software, silicon and systems
- Red Hat: an open-source technology solutions provider.
