Enterprise Security

This is possibly one of the few categories where seven vendors managed to

join the Users' Choice club. Of these, Symantec has taken the top spot this

year, winning over runner up Cisco by a narrow margin. McAfee was at the third

spot. Others that made it to the club were CheckPoint, Fortinet, Microsoft, and

TrendMicro. Interestingly, Linux and Open Source based security solutions

couldn't make it to the club. Symantec scored high across five out of the eight

industries we reached out to this time. Its brand perception was low in BFSI and

services, and moderately low in IT/ITeS. Cisco on the other hand had very high

brand perception across these three segments where Symantec appeared weak. In

the remaining segments, while its brand perception came out very high, it was

lower than Symantec's. One segment where Cisco's brand perception appears to be

alarmingly low is healthcare. McAfee's brand perception was alarmingly low in

the services industry, and the strongest in process manufacturing. Likewise,

CheckPoint had strong brand perception in the discrete manufacturing segment,

but was weak in BFSI, communication media, and education segments. Coming to

brand loyalty, 52% of existing owners of Symantec said that they're likely to

use the same brand for the near future also. Loyalty amongst Cisco's existing

users was slightly higher at 55%. McAfee faces a concern on brand loyalty, with

only 32% of its existing owners saying that they're likely to stick with the

same brand over the next six months. The remaining brands didn't get sufficient

votes for us to pass any judgment. The biggest gainer from brand shifts emerged

as Symantec. 3.8% of the total users of non-Symantec brands said that they're

likely to purchase Symantec security solution in the next six months. Checkpoint

was the second highest gainer.