Customer dissatisfaction

Feeling joined at the hip to your IT vendors? You’re not alone.

According to market research firm Walker Information, half of 2,259 IT executives surveyed are unhappy or less than pleased with their IT vendors. However, many say cost and deployment barriers make it difficult to switch to another provider.

“People stay because the cost of exit is too high,” says Marc Drizin, vice president and loyalty specialist at Walker. “Three out of four people will buy again, and of that 75%, two-thirds want to and one-third have to.”

The study measured customers’ attitudes and experiences with hardware and software vendors, including 3Com, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Seagate and Sun. Results show that 54% of respondents see the value offered by companies as “excellent” or “very good.”

Network equipment merits the highest rating for overall quality. However, IT executives say purchases of infrastructure software, such as network management or security, and enterprise applications lock them in more than network hardware, server or storage systems.

Likewise, the larger the company, the more likely it is to maintain its IT investments by remaining loyal to a particular vendor.