While there are more than nine players in this space, only four managed to
get sufficient votes to make it to the Users' Choice club. The winning brand
remains the same as in the past several years-D-Link.
Actually, the correct structured-cabling product brandname is DigiLink, owned
by Smartlink Network Systems-which was earlier D-Link India. But as almost all
respondents said “D-Link” (the survey was unprompted), that is how we captured
it. (A separate company spun off from the erstwhile D-Link India retains the
D-Link name and brand.)
D-Link (DigiLink) leads the brand perception index by a wide margin against
all other players. So if its score is normalized to 100, the next closest brand,
Systimax is at 16, and the rest are lower still.
In the industry-wise analysis, D-Link has the strongest brand perception
across all industries we reached out to. Systimax had stronger brand perception
in the services segment as compared to other segments. It was alarmingly low in
four sectors: discrete manufacturing, IT/ITeS, healthcare, and education. The
remaining vendors had fairly low brand perception across all industries.
The performance by D-Link (DigiLink) was consistent across the regions.
Systimax's brand presence was relatively strong in the south and west as
compared to north and east. The same went for Finolex. Tyco's strength was in
the south.
The prime reason given by respondents for choosing structured cabling brands
was product reliability. This came across strongly for both existing owners of
structured cabling as well as future prospects.