Leader: CIOs' perceptions of the big vendors

A few days back, this publication - and many others, we presume - was emailed some 'research' from a consultancy, ranking a number of large players in a major tech market. It was interesting enough but while we were treated to a 'top of the table' line-up, details of which providers faired worse were scant.

The reason? Well, no one knows for sure in this case but we'd bet that quite often the company publishing this kind of study then has a hook to approach those that did poorly and offer some help - maybe selling them some kind of consulting.

An independent publication shouldn't have any such ulterior motives. So it was that in May, at one of the year's major events for heads of IT (the IT Directors Forum on board the Oriana cruise liner), silicon.com asked 267 of the great and good on the user side of the equation to rank 10 of the largest hardware and software vendors.

The criteria? Criterion, more like. Unashamedly, this wasn't a survey on customer service or which vendor produces the best products or who innovates more. Or any one of a number of things. It was just a request asking for a knee-jerk, 'please rank these 10 in terms of your perception' reaction.

Some of the companies involved are more happy with our methodology than others.

If you are a Cisco or Microsoft (both did well) you're probably happier than a Siebel, Sun or SAP, which on this occasion were the opposite of chart toppers. (What is it with names beginning with 'S'?)

Now, anyone propping up such a table might well point to their own satisfied users, to their own research or other studies that contradict what the 267 IT heads told us on that day. Fair enough.

We'd love to run the same poll frequently, with exactly the same respondents, and chart changes in perceptions.

The vendors might also point to the relativity of such a format. Limiting choices to 10 companies might actually place you 10th out of 10,000 options - which would hardly be bad.

But as a simple snapshot of users' perceptions, such an approach has some meaning.

On the other hand, here's another way to look at the findings: when this week we asked a separate pool of users, the silicon.com CIO Jury, about buying from the big boys - and all our 10 options are big - then they told us that more often than not such vendors will win out over smaller, sometimes more innovative suppliers.

Call it pressure from the board, call it fear about smaller companies disappearing, call it the IBM factor (as in 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM').

The top 10 we have focused on may have its winners and losers but all of them, barring takeovers, before anyone asks about the presence of a Siebel on the list, are still in a strong position.