India's Most Wanted IT Brands

Continued from page: 9

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Messaging Solutions, ERP Software

Messaging Solutions

This is another category, where the names of the key brands would be pretty obvious. The market is largely split between Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino. The surprise packet in this however, is Linux, which is at the third spot with noteworthy current ownership. Brand preferences in this category are also evenly split amongst the three brands. On a relative scale though, their persuasion levels are not very high. Meaning, the number of people who have these brands on top of their minds is more than the number of people with a likelihood of buying these messaging solutions.

Microsoft Exchange has the highest brand pull of the lot, followed surprisingly by Linux, and then Lotus Domino. Plus, all these brands have fewer switch ins than switch outs. What this means is that not too much of switching of customers is happening between these brands. The brand switch matrix makes things clearer. Indeed the brand loyalty percentages are low, but there are no switches happening.

While Microsoft Exchange has a brand loyalty of only 60%, a good 37% of its existing customers didn't give an answer as to which brand would they like to switch to if they had to. Likewise, Lotus Domino had 71% brand loyalty, and 25% with no response, and Linux had the lowest brand loyalty of 33%, with the remaining 67% not having any answer on which brand would they like to switch to. Again, the same logic should apply here, which holds true for most other enterprise class applications. A messaging solutions isn't something you would switch every day. It takes time to deploy a full-fledged mailing system, and both Exchange and Domino are not only mail servers, but full blown messaging solutions, with even workflow built-in. It's very unlikely that a customer would switch out of these brands.

Highest top of mind recall: MS Exchange Highest current ownership: MS Exchange Most likely to buy: MS Exchange

Microsoft Exchange has the highest brand momentum, in addition to the highest current ownership. This is followed by Domino, and finally Linux. The only other brand we actually saw in the matrix was Novell GroupWise, but its current market share was far too low to comment anything about it.

ERP Software

The ERP market is largely dominated by, no prizes for guessing, SAP and Oracle. Ramco is also there, but with a relatively lower market share. Interestingly, there were 7% respondents, who had their own in-house/home grown ERP package.

Besides SAP, Oracle, and Ramco, the remaining brands in this segment had relatively lower market share. Hence it wasn't fair on our part to do an anslysis of their performance.

However, the overall brand persuasion indices in this category are fairly low. Relatively though, the brand persuasion indices of Oracle and Ramco are slightly better. SAP has high top of mind recall, but the number of customers who said that they're likely to buy it is lower.

Nevertheless, SAP still has a higher brand pull than all other brands, including Oracle. In fact, Oracle and SAP were the only two brands to have any brand pull at all. On the brand loyalty front, there aren't any noticeable shifts. This is understandable, considering that this market's characteristics are different from other markets. Once you invest in an ERP package, it's unlikely that you would switch to another ERP anytime soon, if at all. If a switch were to happen, the time taken to make that decision would be fairly long. That's perhaps the reason we had a high number of existing ERP owners in the survey, who were unsure of which brand were they likely to purchase in the next six months. For instance, 55% of existing SAP customers were unsure about which ERP would they purchase. 35% of Oracle's existing customers said the same thing.

Highest top of mind recall: SAP Highest current ownership: SAP Most likely to buy: SAP

Coming to brand momentum, SAP is not only the current leader, but also has the brand momentum to stay ahead in the future also. In fact, the recent news has it that SAP has big plans for the Indian market. Likewise, Oracle follows suite and does have good brand momentum, but needs to pick up more speed if it wants to really grow in the market. Ramco needs to pick up much more speed.

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