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