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Top 40 IT Vendors Rated 69

Posted by kdawson from the rank-'em-danno dept.
An anonymous reader writes "CIO Insight has asked its readers to rate their satisfaction with their vendors. Not surprisingly, 'CIOs are disappointed and disgruntled with the performance of their most important vendors. In fact, the number of companies with lower scores in 2006 than in 2005 outpaces those with higher scores by a margin of two to one.' In first place was CDW, edging out last year's top vendor, Red Hat, which tied for third place this year. Microsoft came in at number 24. The coverage includes a detailed methodology on how the survey was conducted. 826 qualified respondents participated."
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Top 40 IT Vendors Rated More

Top 40 IT Vendors Rated

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  • well, there are reasons.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <yayagu.gmail@com> on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @05:33PM (#17120698) Journal

    I worked for one of these companies, and they come in the bottom five.... I'll not name the company, good luck in your quest to figure it out.

    They laid me off after 21 years, a RCH away from full retirement with benefits... go figure. I was in the middle of a research project that would've connected the corporate on-line directory to APIs for IP phones (this was 3 years) ago. There was an entire team ready to fund my work and we figured in addition to increased productivity, there would be incredible hard dollars savings (no we hadn't done the business case yet). It was a promising project and there was a lot of buzz around it.

    But, meanwhile, my real responsibilities were to be on the team that created the public facing web site...

    Here's why a company like this doesn't end up in the top ratings: our team implemented the web site in .net 1.1 after almost completely creating a java version of it -- Microsoft convinced "us" it was important. And of course it was equally important to port it to .net 2 when that came out, what a nightmare.... those were decisions being made at the managerial level. It didn't matter all of the extra work added zero value to the customer experience, it mattered we had .net 2.0.

    At the team level, I once forgot to capitalize an object or method correctly and was confronted by a peer. This was a day after the code was checked in, tested, and part of the working code. He insisted/demanded it be made kosher, and we spent a little more than half a day getting it "fixed". (I know someone's going to say that's an easy fix... it isn't when the re-factoring tools don't work the way they're supposed to and you have to start pulling in the threads by hand -- and that's what we had to do.)

    And our internal clients? Wow... we spent meeting after meeting trying to all agree on buttons and their shape and their color... mind you this was an argument about the shade of button, not selecting from a pallette of colors.

    Attention to service for real outside customers? Nil.

    Yeah, I liked the company once, it might be apparent on many levels why I don't now. By the time they booted me, I was reminded of the ill-fated Eastern Airlines crash [wikipedia.org] all for the sake of paying too much attention to some landing gear lights while the plane slowly flew into the ground. Way too much attention to virtually irrelevant detail and way too little attention to customer satisfaction.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They probably found out how much time you spent on slashdot karma whoring 10 paragraph first posts.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GweeDo ( 127172 )
      You worked for Accenture.

      Do I get a prize?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Dabido ( 802599 )
      Ooooo, sounds similar to an experience I had. We had stuff ready to roll on a Sun box, and the software we'd bought was only for Unix, but somehow an IBM sales person convinced a manager we should go with some of their machines. Meant we had to buy the software a second time to run on Windows, buy an operating system and new machines from IBM.

      There was a huge arguement over it all, as the Sys. Architect kept trying to explain that the software we'd bought wouldn't run on the stuff IBM was selling, but
  • Um, last time I checked, they had basically zero enterprise presence. The CIO may like his ipod, but they are hardly a major IT vendor at the corporate level. I mean, Lenovo isn't on the list, but Apple is?

     

    • Re:How is Apple an important vendor to CIOs? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by R3d M3rcury ( 871886 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @06:03PM (#17121170) Journal
      Well, according to the page [cioinsight.com], 17% of the companies questioned dealt with Apple. So I assume it's a case where not too many people do, but those who do are pretty happy.

      I was amused by the individual rankings, though. Apple's highest scores came in "increasing revenue", "solves problems", and "high quality." Apple's lowest scores were "costs", "return on investment" (related to cost), and "flexible and responsive." In others words, they love Macs but they think they cost too much.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by killjoe ( 766577 )
        I guess this survey puts a nail in the coffin of the "you don't have somebody to blame" whinging you hear on /. all the time. RedHat not only gives you somebody to blame but they are more responsive and responsible then oracle, MS, IBM, Sun, Novell and just about everybody else.

        This has got to be a massive sales tool for a company that relies on service to make money.
    • Um, last time I checked, they had basically zero enterprise presence.

      Well...except for the US Army, Virginia Tech, you know...no organization of any size.
      • at the Army site I'm at I can count the apples without using all of my fingers on one hand - about 2,000 Dells though. Of course there are hundreds of Army bases and they're all different.
        • I can count the apples without using all of my fingers on one hand

          July 5, 2004 [fcw.com] "With the announcement that it is providing 1,566 servers to an Army supercomputer project, Apple Computer Inc. is making a move..."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MsGeek ( 162936 )
      Umm...have you used a ThinkPad lately? Notice the craptastic quality? Have you used any of the Lenovo-branded atrocities out there? The fears of IBM fanboys and fangirls with regard to what Lenovo would do with the ThinkPad brand have come brutally true. The new stuff SUCKS.

      The last ThinkPad I would advise anyone purchasing would be the T42. Stuff designed by IBM but executed at Lenovo, including the T43, is OK but not great. Once you get into Lenovo designed/built models, however...whoa nelly. This is not
    • they had basically zero enterprise presence.

      Most major companies have a graphic design/PR/art design department. And about 85-90% of those departments heavily utilize Macs. No, Apple doesn't sell but a tiny percentage (probably about 4-5) the volume that Dell/HP/Lenovo do to most businesses. Apple his a tiny presence but in most companies. The Wintel competiors have a big presence, each in a slice of companies.
  • Most of these vendors like to stick a sales guy in your face and sell what you obviously don't need. They could sell you a 3MB piece of software but prefer to bloat it to 3GB DVDs so you "think" you get more for your dollars. These tactics no longer work. Times have changed.

  • "If our company had a choice we would continue to do business with this vendor."

  • HP rates higher than Dell? (Score:3, Informative)

    by dartarrow ( 930250 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @05:54PM (#17121038) Homepage
    That seems a bit funny, considering how Dell has usually been more customer/sales focused, as opposed to the focus on technology by HP. The Laptop-that-blew-up must not be helping their ratings either ;)

    I don't know how it is in other countries but where I am, the customer support of Dell is outsourced to other companies. Even Siemens is one of the support vendors. And a lot of these people have close to zero knowledge on Linux. Considering the fact that Dell (kindof) supports RHEL, thats pretty stupid.

    I've personally had to deal with morons from Dell support. One guy came in to fit a new server on our rack, and he came in with wrongly sized nuts for the rails. We redirected the surveillance cam at him to grab 50 minutes of him RTFM.. which I later showed to the management.

    Needless to say our next server will be an HP.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by maxume ( 22995 )
      So you state that you think Dell should be higher than HP and then relate an anecdote about Dell sucking the big one and your company moving to HP? I don't get it.
    • ``The Laptop-that-blew-up must not be helping their ratings either ;)''

      Having parts manufactured by a third party catch fire is one thing. Pretending the problem isn't there and thus knowingly letting your customers run around with fire-prone hardware is on an entirely different level. This issue _should_ cost them major goodwill.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by sharkey ( 16670 )
      You mean the "Let's just unplug all the SCSI cables attached to PCs with green lights to try and fix the one with no lights" Dell? Big time agreement on Dell's technical acumen.

      On the HP side, we have a DL360.

      The choice is between incompetent techs and Sirius Cybernetics-quality hardware.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > Dell has usually been more customer/sales focused

      We must be thinking of two different companies named Dell. When people usually talk about Dell on a technical site, they mean the company founded in Austin, TX by Michael Dell in 1984. That company has never been focused on customers. They're focused on pushing garbage hardware to users that don't know better. Sales? Ever try to buy from them? It's near freaking impossible. The last set of monitors I bought took almost 20 man-hours for those compl

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fred_A ( 10934 )

        Sales? Ever try to buy from them? It's near freaking impossible.

        Reminds me of DEC... Where conversations with salespeople usually went like this :

        Me: So how much are those Alpha stations ?
        Dec Guy: Well, it depends...
        Me: It depends on what ?
        Dec Guy: Oh, it can depend on a lot of things...
        Me: Such as ?
        Dec Guy: Oh lots of things really. Here's a brochure.
        Me: (Looking at content-free drool-proof brochure)
        This doesn't say anything, just that in theory you sell Alpha stations
        Dec Guy: Oh but we do.
        Me: So

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Morrigu ( 29432 )
      Dell's professional services are, and I mean this in the nicest sense of the word, fucking clueless. We got one guy who had just "graduated" from field tech to storage engineer, and when he got called in to fix our (broken) Dell-badged SAN after it went down and lost several terabytes of data, sat there in front of the rack reading TFM for 2 hours. Yes, we were paying hundreds of dollars per hour for some goon who had never done this before, since that's who Dell sent us. The incident got escalated up t
      • If there is one thing I've learned while being a network consultant it's this: it doesn't matter what company you work for, you still don't know crap until you are thrown into a fire. So, when you go out and spend big money bringing in an "expert" from any vendor, chances are darned good that you are getting a newbie. After all, the best techs are the ones that are promoted into higher-level jobs, leaving the BS calls for the new guys.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Morrigu ( 29432 )
          I agree entirely with you about experience in fire-fighting. My problem is that when a customer is paying lots of money for "expert" support, they should be getting experts, not someone doing this for the first time. If you want to bring a newbie along so they can learn, that's cool, but for US$150+/hour, I expect someone who knows what they're doing and has done it before, not someone who's still reading TFM. If you're paying US$50/hour, that's a different issue.

          I've worked with people who are good at p

  • CDW ranked number 1 (Score:5, Funny)

    by DreadfulGrape ( 398188 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @05:58PM (#17121100)
    So that obnoxious techie on the CDW TV commercials is actually right?

  • What do CIOs know? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ximenes ( 10 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @06:14PM (#17121286)
    Since when do CIOs know about this kind of stuff? I have yet to encounter someone in an upper position like that who is aware of this sort of thing, although they do all have opinions regardless of actual experience.

    My manager loves Best Buy for Business and Tiger Direct for instance; even though we get superior service and pricing through GovConnection forget that! Too convenient.

    Can't keep Belkin and Belden straight either.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aaronl ( 43811 )
      I was one of the respondents to this survey. I don't know what their selection strategy was, but I'm surprised to find out that under a thousand took the silly thing. I just figured that they emailed requests bugging everyone that they were sending their free magazines to. IIRC, they offered a contest for something or other if you filled it out.

      Not everyone that participates in these surveys is a total Office Space style incompetent twit. :)

      (I'll have to check out GovConnection. I've been using Florida

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Avatar8 ( 748465 )
      I completely agree.

      According to the "how the survey was conducted link," only IT director and higher were considered. Then it was based upon responses that considered themselves knowledgeable of the vendors. Granted there probably are some IT executives out there that do know what's going on with vendors, but in my 22 years in IT, I have yet to meet one.

      IT execs have their skills and their place; in every job I've been in, their job is to make decisions based upon what their underlings provide to them or

  • Yes! (Score:3, Funny)

    by edwardpickman ( 965122 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @06:22PM (#17121378)
    Microsoft cracked the top 40 list. Looks like all that hardwork is paying off!
  • If these CIOs are anything like my CIO...

    I mean, all vendors are going to have problems, and cause problems from time to time.

    But if these CIOs are anything like my CIO, their problems have little to do with the vendors getting the blame, and everything to do with the CIO's own ignorance and incompetence.

    CIO: I heard great things about this vendor, but whenever we tried to work with them, they sucked.

    REALITY: The vendor is quite capable of doing great things... for CIOs who understand the technology, its us
  • The MS one.
    Not really Happy Happy Joy Joy but many want back in.
    http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image /14/0,1425,sz=1&i=147743,00.gif [ziffdavisinternet.com]
    • It's the "Whitney Houston / Bobby Brown" syndrome. They keep thinking if they come back one more time, they won't get slapped silly.
  • I for one cannot blame our CIO. Since I deal with the people between him and me on a daily basis I know what he is up against. Basically the CIO is up against the same problem I am. The people in between. They will rarely, actually never, admit their decisions or lack of ability to make decisions are the problem. We continue down the same path as always because the middle refuses to take responsibility and having done so for so long they refuse to make new decisions to correct it. They collude with ea

  • Newegg (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wesw02 ( 846056 )
    Where's newegg? Out of the 10 vendors on that list who I have bought from, none of there customer support comes close to newegg. Not to mention newegg ships stuff at record speeds.
    • I use and love Newegg myself; I use them for both my own personal purchases, and those "crap, my dvd burner no longer works" purchases at the office. However, Newegg is not an enterprise distributer like, for example, CDW. Try buying a Cisco router, CTO server, and so on from them and let me know how it goes.
  • Considering McAfee is nowhere close to the bottom, that says something about that list :)
  • Check out the Microsoft results [cioinsight.com]. Even though they rank mediocre in almost every question (average between 50-60%, though sometimes up to a solid C+), 80% of vendors said that, given a choice, they'd still choose Microsoft. Strange O.o
  • This list somewhat confirms what I've been telling a lot of people - the technology industry is becoming WalMartified. Sales of commodity technologies: servers, switches, routers, monitors, phones, etc. are best purchased through national (or global) vendors, like CDW. These places have the size, scope, and presence to consistently deliver the best prices and service. In contrast, regional or local VARs are dying. They can't compete with CDW on price, service or availability. Most regional or local VARs are

  • CDW Says - "JERK OFF " (Score:3, Funny)

    by skillrod ( 555920 ) on Tuesday December 05, 2006 @11:06PM (#17124328)
    http://picasaweb.google.com/SkillWater/BRAINWASH/p hoto#5005252477500827698 [google.com]CDW Catalog Scan 1 http://picasaweb.google.com/SkillWater/BRAINWASH/p hoto#5005252670774356034 [google.com]CDW Catalog Scan 2

    Back in 1998 I ordered WindowsNT Server software from CDW. When an advetised rebate was not included I called them on it. After the call I received this catalog in the mail.

    CDW Says "Jerk Off" to it's customers.

    (This is the actual scan of my CDW catalog)

    -EnJoY My wAste
  • I think it's great that EDS [eds.com] didn't make the top 40. Where's the rest of the list? I'd really like to see where they ended up.

  • AVAYA? Holy carp! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These are people who are using the same root password on thousands of network-attached systems all over the United States? The people who still ship machines with an account named oracle, password oracle (which they don't inform their customers about) TO THIS DAY?

    Damn, CIOs are clueless... where do I get a job that requires no knowledge of the craft?
  • Things always look rosy at the CIO level who never have to deal with calling the tech support. CDW is #1? Give me a break. They've screwed up our orders so many times. I want to see a survey done from the techies' level who actually have to deal with these people.

  • The Real Reason (Score:4, Funny)

    by brajesh ( 847246 ) <{brajesh.sachan} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday December 06, 2006 @01:13AM (#17125222) Homepage
    The (and with The I mean 'Teh')Real
    Reason why CIOs are disappointed
    and disgruntled with the performance
    of their most important vendors is...

    [Click On Ad] [Next]
  • All you need to know is that Symantec came in at 14 out ot 40. If that doesn't indicate that either the study is worthless or that customer satisfaction is at disaster levels, it's hard to imagine what would.

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