Managed Storage Service Provider

This is a new category we've added to the awards this time. With the amount
of storage growing by leaps and bounds, organizations have started outsourcing
its management to external service providers in order to save cost of purchasing
fresh storage and its management.

There are plenty of vendors providing managed storage services. In fact we
found that we received responses for 31 different vendors from our respondents.
Out of these, only three were able to make it to the club-HP, IBM, and Wipro.

HP took the crown this time, winning over IBM by a very slim margin. Wipro
was there, but far behind HP and IBM. At an overall level, the concept of using
managed storage services haven't been very well adopted.

Maybe that's why even the overall top of mind recall for the brands in this
space is pretty low.

The winner HP, received a brand recall from 38% of the respondents, while IBM
was at 28%, and Wipro at 3%. Likewise, the current ownership, overall brand
loyalties, and shift-in are all pretty low due to this.

The sectors that have been adopting managed storage services the most need no
introduction. The highest adoption seems to be in discrete manufacturing, BFSI,
and IT/ITeS segments.

Amongst the three top brands in this space, HP's brand perception was highest
amongst BFSI, process manufacturing, and education segments.

IBM's stronghold was in IT/ITeS, communication media, healthcare, and
services segments. Wipro had a good stronghold in the discrete manufacturing
segment.

Zone wise, IBM respondents were equally distributed across all four zones
while HP was strong in south and west, followed by north. It received pretty low
responses from the east.

The primary factor for choosing these brands amongst their owners was the
after sales support and service. While the same factor remains a good reason for
future purchase also, but the primary reason has changed to become brand value.

Coming to brand switch analysis, among 43% of the HP users who are likely to
upgrade in the near future, 35% said that they would like to stick to HP, and
57% were not sure or had no plans to shift to any brand. IBM's brand loyalty was
higher than HP at 61%, with uncertainty amongst 33% of the existing users.

Wipro's brand loyalty amongst the respondents who were using its services was
29%, with uncertainty amongst the remaining 71% of users. whereas HCL is. HP is
also enjoying the maximum number of possible shift-in in the near future.