Vendor loyalty under pressure as enterprises cut costs, consolidate

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 12 July 2009 07:55

IT Industry - Strategy

“While incumbent vendors clearly have an advantage in terms of impacting organisations’ decisions-making process, this advantage is not insurmountable since the majority of respondents make decisions based on other factors,” Barnes says.

However, despite the pressure on enterprises to look outside their existing vendor relationships, for those that do consider their existing relationships when making architectural planning and/or product purchase decisions, Microsoft leads from IBM, with HP and Oracle equal in third place.
 
According to Springboard, Microsoft also scored the highest ranking in terms of mindshare, again with IBM in second place ahead of Oracle.

The study also reveals that the top enterprise software classes considered as strategic by enterprises in the APEJ (Asia Pacific excluding Japan) are operating systems, ERP, security and CRM respectively.

Springboard says that, while 86% of the respondent organisations in the region consider enterprise applications to be part of their strategic software infrastructure, only 38% consider mainframes and/or mainframe-based applications and systems to be part of this infrastructure.

Findings in the report are based on interviews with 442 CIOs, IT managers and business managers at large and SMB enterprises in Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Singapore.