Managed Security Services

Despite being a new category, this is perhaps the only category in this story

where eight brands made it to the Users' Choice club. Of these, IBM is a clear

winner leaving runner up Wipro behind by a wide margin. HP is close on the heels

of Wipro and the remaining brands are at a fair distance from HP.

The industry wise perception of these brands is pretty interesting. There's

no single organization that has managed to dominate even a major portion of the

industry spectrum. Rather different industries seem to be dominated by different

brands. This provides every brand an opportunity to tap new markets. For

instance IBM showed the strongest brand perception score in IT/ITeS, and it also

had a good grip of the process manufacturing industry.

Wipro has a good grip on discrete manufacturing, communication and media, and

the education segments. HP had the strongest brand perception in media and

communication space. CMS was strongest in discrete manufacturing and healthcare

segments. Other brands had fairly low or negligible brand perceptions across all

industries.

The same story existing with the region wise strong hold of various brands.

IBM was strong in south and west, while Wipro was strongest in south. HP was

strongest in west and east, while CMS was strong in west. Remaining brands were

moderately strong or had negligible presence across all regions.

Managed security services is certainly not something organizations would be

willing to go for, particularly because of the discomfort of giving our your

organization's security management to an external entity.

So obviously it would be interesting to know the primary reasons for choosing

any of these brands. We analyzed it for only Wipro and IBM, and found that in

both cases, existing users of their services had chosen them for brand value and

after sales support and service. So clearly, reputation of the vendor matters

when going for managed security services. For those who're likely to use the

services of these two brands, the top reason was reliability of the product.

However, the second reason was brand value, and it was very close behind the

first reason.

In brand loyalty, 27% of existing IBM customers said that they were likely to

stay with the same brand in the near future also. The remaining 73% were not

sure or had no plans to shift to any brand. A similar picture existed with other

brands as well, and it's not surprising because you don't change your MSP for

security every day.