Senior-level IT executives are a notoriously tough and cynical crowd, especially when listening to the claims of Oracle, Microsoft, AT&T and the other companies that provide products without which no major corporation could run.
Problem is, those products and services are often barely usable, or so unreliable as to drive both the CIOs and their business-unit customers crazy.
On the other hand, some companies—even those that have consistently disappointed their customers in the past—can sometimes remake themselves and their reputations in a single year.
Some telecoms and consulting companies did exactly that this year, as did some of the security companies whose products are supposed to snuff out many of the threats that have crippled online corporate operations this year.
CIOInsight’s annual survey of senior-level IT executives reveals who are the winners and losers in the overall race for the loyalty of their customers, while Baseline magazine goes into a little more detail about how customers feel about the performance of individual security companies.
Neither set of stories paints a particularly rosy picture, but there are some shining examples of how good a vendor/customer relationship can be when both are holding up their ends of what is unquestionably a complex and difficult relationship.
Survey Guide:Click hereto download the full survey results.
- Are Your Vendors Fighting to Keep You Happy?
Competition has driven many major IT vendors to new levels of customer service and effectiveness, according to our survey of senior IT execs. The question is, why didn’t competition drive the rest of the market to improve? - CIOs Describe Like-Hate Relationships With Vendors: The least surprising result of this year’s customer-satisfaction survey is that CIOs hate their telecom vendors. The most surprising is that companies that always rate badly have done little to improve customers’ opinions of them.
- Winners and Losers: Survey Shows Shifts in Customer Esteem: Consultants and telecoms have fared poorly in past surveys; so why are ratings for some of them rising so quickly, while Oracle, AT&T, Symantec and others drop in double-digit percentages?
- Excelling in Spots: Customer Evaluations by Category: Oracle sank to the bottom of ROI estimations following acquisition of other celler-dwellar PeopleSoft. SAP rises a bit; security vendors retain their spots near the top of the list, as do Indian outsourcers.
- How The Survey Was Done: Questions and methods we used to estimate how CIOs feel about the vendors on which they depend.
Compare your vendor’s result to last year’s: 2004: Are Your Vendors Providing More Value?
See also:
Baseline Magazine Security Vendor Reviews: - Symantec: Beyond Viruses: Symantec offers a slew of security-related products and services, but the company is still known largely for its antivirus software.
- McAfee Aims to Prevent Intrusion as well as Viruses: Antivirus software is the hub of its offerings, though McAfee has also expanded to provide other flavors of security software.
- Juniper Makes Up Ground Securing ‘Net Gear: Once it became clear network security was strategically important to Cisco, Juniper felt it had to catch up fast.
- CA is Effective with Security Management Apps: The company styles itself as a provider of security management tools to help organizations wrap their heads around the task of defending their data.
- Cisco Simplifies Security With Security Enabled Gear: Cisco has used its status as the de facto choice for networking gear to slipstream its firewall and virtual private networking products into the mix.
- Cisco Simplifies Security With Security Enabled Gear: Cisco has used its status as the de facto choice for networking gear to slipstream its firewall and virtual private networking products into the mix.