The growth of this market is closely associated with the growth of laptops,
because it's the combination of both that gives a truly mobile solution.
Two key players dominate the market, according to our survey, as far as top
of mind recall, future likelihood of purchase, or current ownership are
concerned. These are (no prizes for guessing) Cisco and D-Link. Out of these,
again, Cisco is the winner of the Users' Choice award, being the most future
ready brand. Before we get into the individual brands and how they fared, let's
look at the market condition based on our survey.
The demand for wireless access solutions is growing by leaps and bounds, as
suggested by our survey. Last year, only 35% of the users said that they were
likely to purchase a wireless solution. The remaining 65% were either not sure
of which solution to purchase, or had no plans for the same.
This year however, that figure has almost doubled to 64%. This is possibly
due to the rapid growth witnessed by the laptops market. With more WiFi enabled
laptops in the market, there's a greater demand on CIOs to offer them
connectivity on the move.
Coming back to the key brands in this segment, D-Link has improved its
position as compared to last year. While it had a score of 48% on the future
readiness index last year, this year it's gone up to a whopping 77%. It has also
become a more persuasive brand as compared to last year, though Cisco is still
the most persuasive.
D-Link's brand pull situation however, is a concern area. It had higher brand
pull than Cisco last year. This year, the situation is exactly the reverse.
Brand pull is the ratio of users likely to switch-in over users likely to
switch out. So obviously higher switch-ins than switch-outs is what's desired.
Here, although both are gaining brand pull (more switch-ins than outs), D-Link's
success ratio in the same is well below that of Cisco's.
The brand loyalty situation is also very interesting. Although both Cisco an
D-Link have improved their brand loyalty as compared to last year, the number of
CIOs who said that they're likely to switch to another brand has increased. Last
year, this shift out percentage was only 4% for both brands.
This year, likely switch out of Cisco has reached 11% and for D-Link, it's
19%. The next obvious question is where are the likely shifts happening to? A
majority of them are happening to the other, (i.e. existing Cisco users likely
to switch to D-Link and vice versa), while some of them are shifting to other
lesser known brands.
A few other brands that could not make it to the Users' Choice club were
3Com, Nortel, Enterasys, and HP ProCurve.