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.