High-end Servers

This time too it's a battle between two giants, IBM and HP. The former

retains its top throne, but with a very narrow margin. Two other players are

also there in the club, namely Dell and Sun, but they're far behind. While HP

enjoyed a slightly higher top of mind recall, IBM had a slightly higher current

ownership. In terms of brand pull, both are equally attractive brands. Industry

wise, we found that IBM had the strongest brand perception in process

manufacturing, IT/ITes and services sectors. It was a little weak in education

and discrete manufacturing. HP on the other hand had the highest brand

perception in discrete manufacturing and healthcare. Dell had the highest brand

perception, ahead of everyone else in BFSI, communication media and education.

The key reason quoted by most of our respondents who either owned or were

planning to buy HP or IBM was reliability. This isn't surprising considering

that we're talking about mission critical servers. The brand switch matrix in

this segment was very interesting. We didn't get any brand loyalty scores. In

all cases, a majority of respondents had either no plans or were not sure which

other high-end server to shift to. This is understandable as these servers can

be quite expensive and have very long life cycles. Decisions to shift or buy

afresh are not easy.

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MFD