InformationWeek Analytics recent survey on Enterprise Network Buyers reveals some strong trends. Standards compliance proves to be the determining factor for buyers, over and above feature-packed equipment.
In a recent survey on enterprise network buyers, Information Week, asked five hundred and ten professionals from the IT Sector, to rate in order of importance from one to five on—necessity and importance of certain features of their network equipment.
Standards precede Proprietary technology
The enterprise professionals indicated that compliance with industry standards were the most important aspect of network equipment and received a rating of 4.1; technology riding on the biggest proprietary names in the industry seemed the least important and was rated 3.0. User experience with software and hardware upgrades received a 3.7 rating; latency at threshold was rated 3.7. Ethernet and Fibre Channel convergence was rated 3.6 while migration path for 40 Gbit to 100 Gbit Ethernet received a 3.5 rating.
The report authored by Kurt Marko, concludes that cutting-edge, and advanced features that vendors list and package so innovatively are in realtime --add-ons, which buyers consider, only after essential standards are compliance is achieved.
Vendor rating clustered between 79-73 percent
The survey also asked participants to rank twelve of the network features. The rankings were as follows-the highest ranked was Cisco at 79% ; with IBM and HP tied at 77%; while next was Avaya at 75%, Juniper was ranked at 74% along with Brocade; Dell was ranked, at the bottom of the list at 73%.