Structured Cabling

We introduced this category last year, and

D-Link continues to wear the winner's crown this year too. The remaining structured

cabling majors are still far behind. There has been a slight shuffle in the rankings and more players this time over last year. 

Avaya Systimax managed to improve its UPI rating over last year, and continues its strong hold as runner up. Finolex moved out of the club this year, as it couldn't gather sufficient votes. Molex

enters the Users'Choice Club in its place. Tyco Electronics seems to have been active in the market, because it turned up out of nowhere at the number three

position. 

Before reading the brand loyalty tables, one has to understand that Structured cabling is a long-term commitment and so a brand loyalty switch should be seen more as being applicable to new facilities being setup by the respondent rather than to existing facilities. 

Also, given the same context, one should read brand switch as an expression of dissatisfaction than anything else.

One would expect the brand loyalties to be pretty strong in this segment, because this is perhaps the only IT investment that lasts the longest. Once you've laid out the structured cabling, you forget about it for years. In fact, even the warranties in this segment run for 15 years or higher. But we didn't find the highest of brand loyalties in this segment. Systimax and Tyco were the only ones with more than 90% brand loyalty. D-Link, despite its

huge lead over the others, seems to be lagging behind in brand loyalty. 

Around 5% of its existing customers said that they plan to move to Systimax, and surprisingly, around 12% said they wanted to move to some other brand that's not even in this list. Of course, where D-Link looses votes to Systimax, it gains from Molex, and that too significantly. Around 17% of existing Molex customers said that they want to move to D-Link for structured cabling. In fact, Molex also had the lowest brand loyalty of all brands. 

We are not finished yet with brand loyalty. There's a lot of traffic moving towards D-Link from other players that didn't make it into the club, and even 7% of existing Krone customers plan to buy D-Link structured cabling in the future. 

What's really interesting in this segment is the “Others” category. It's taking up significant chunks of votes from key players in the club. For instance, Systimax's brand loyalty is pretty strong, but 7% of its existing owners want to shift to some “Other” brand. 

As far as support goes, D-Link enjoyed high support from companies of all sizes. Systimax enjoyed maximum support from companies with turnover of 500 to 1000 crores, though it was still lower than D-Link. The bottomline from these results is that the other players will really have to work hard to

dethrone D-Link, according to the data. 

Most of the major players in this arena have been innovating as well as spreading awareness about their work, so it's a pretty interesting area to watch.