India's Most Wanted IT Brands

Continued from page: 7

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Application Servers, High-end Servers

Application Servers

One of the hottest buzzwords in the enterprise today is Service Oriented Architecture. Lots of organizations are evaluating ways of shifting to this. The application server is the middleware that makes this possible, and is therefore a key ingredient of SOA. The key brands that came up for
application servers in our survey were Oracle 9i/10g, IBM Websphere and Novell.

On the brand persuasion front, all brands need work. Nowhere is the likelihood of buying a particular brand higher than or even equal to its top of mind recall. The only exception is Borland, but it falls far behind the other key brands like Oracle and IBM. Sun One, Tomcat, SGI have very low numbers, and therefore can't really be analyzed. On a relative scale though, Oracle is ahead of all in brand persuasion, followed by IBM. Novell has high top of mind recall, but the likelihood of buying is pretty low.

Coming to brand pull, all the brands had more switch-outs of existing customers to competition than switch-ins. Oracle and IBM had the same brand pull situation, while Novell's situation was a little worse.

Oracle had the highest brand loyalty of 72%. Another 22% of Oracle's existing customers didn't quite have plans to shift to any brand, nor did they mention anything about sticking with Oracle itself in the future. IBM was at a brand loyalty of 67%, and 27% of its existing customers didn't mention anything about shifting to any brand either.

Highest top of mind recall: IBM WebSphere Highest current ownership: IBM WebSphere Most likely to buy: Oracle 9i/10G

Finally, Novell was at 59% brand loyalty with a few of its existing customers saying they're likely to shift to SGI. A whopping 35% of Novell's existing customers didn't mention any brand that they would shift to.

Overall, Oracle has the highest brand momentum and a large current ownership base, making it the most future ready of the lot. IBM Websphere has slightly lesser brand momentum compared to Oracle. Both Novell and Borland need to work towards building both momentum and current ownership.

High-end Servers

This market has a limited number of players because building high-end servers isn't everybody's cup of tea. IBM is recalled the most as the top of mind brand followed by HP, Sun, Dell and the rest. But when you check how many of these respondents are likely to purchase these brands, the picture seems to be a little concerning.

In most of the cases, we found brand persuasion to be lower for all the brands. On a relative scale though, HP had higher brand persuasion than both Sun and IBM. Sun had higher brand persuasion than IBM in this segment.

The figures for SGI, Unisys, and Dell were too low for us to pass any judgments. 

When it comes to brand pull, it was HP that topped the charts. There were more competing brands switching in to HP than switching out of HP.

IBM's brand pull was actually slightly lower, with more switch-outs happening than switch-ins. Sun's situation was worse than IBM. Both Sun and

IBM, therefore, need to watch their existing customers, so that they don't end up losing them to competing brands.

HP also enjoyed the highest brand loyalty in this segment at 89%.

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

The balance users either said that they're likely to shift to other brands or were not sure about shifting. HP is also gaining from IBM, Dell and other relatively unknown brands. IBM's brand loyalty was lower than HP's at 80%. Note that IBM is gaining from Sun's customer base, and losing some to HP and Dell. Sun had brand loyalty of only 30%.

Interestingly, around 38% of the CIOs didn't give an answer to brand shift. The overall picture is quite clear. HP has high brand momentum, while IBM has a higher current ownership. The former needs to focus on increasing mass, and the latter needs to focus on gaining momentum. Sun needs to focus on both.

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