Cisco vs. the world

Cisco is well entrenched in the minds of CIOs, leaving other vendors to fight among themselves, according to Goldman Sachs’ conclusions from a recent survey of IT executives.

As I noted last time, the financial services firm routinely surveys a group of 100 top IT executives from Fortune 1000 companies, covering topics ranging from network spending to Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop.

Goldman Sachs also asked Cisco-specific questions. Asked which competitor is gaining the most traction vs. Cisco as a network equipment vendor to their organizations, 53% of the executives said they are not planning to buy from any Cisco competitor in the next 12 months.

Competitors, then, divided up less than half the pie. Eighteen percent picked Extreme Networks, followed by Enterasys Networks at 9%, Juniper at 6%, Foundry Networks at 5%, Avaya at 5% and Nortel at 4%.

Goldman Sachs noted that Cisco has 60% or better market share in almost all its enterprise product segments. It concluded that “as long as Cisco continues to maintain a good relationship with the channel, remains relatively price competitive, and maintains its excellent reputation for customer support, there is little incentive for a Cisco-loyal large enterprise customer to add more vendors to the network infrastructure.”

The firm adds that non-Cisco vendors will most likely compete against each other for the rest of the market, by hitting distinct niches or providing better features or prices than their competitors.

Interesting is the 6% vote for Juniper. Juniper makes equipment for service providers, and it is worth noting this beginning of mind share in the enterprise.