New Delhi, Delhi, India, January 31, 2007 -- A nation-wide annual Customer Satisfaction Audit among 584 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) shows that the satisfaction level of CIOs with vendors in every IT category has gone down. There is a drop of two to three points from the satisfaction levels registered in the previous year.

The audit conducted by the leading IT industry publication, Dataquest, a CyberMedia publication, is based on a survey of 584 CIOs of large enterprises from ET 500 and BS 1000 lists conducted by research firm IDC India.

The enterprise business is a critical half of the domestic IT market in India, a market expected to be over $16 billion (over Rs 70,000 crore) in 2006-07.

The survey points to a lack of clarity in pricing, declining credit terms, irregularity in providing spare parts and in some cases even the expertise of the vendor service teams to solve problems are the common grudges CIOs have against vendors.

Sharing details of the 5th Dataquest-IDC's Annual Customer Satisfaction Audit Prasanto K. Roy, Chief Editor of Dataquest said, "CIO expectations are rising rapidly. They're looking for quick delivery, and ready to deploy hardware and solutions. Whatever the vendors have done in a competitive environment, it isn't enough. "

However, he adds that customer dissatisfaction is a fact of this competitive world and its measure is a great benchmark for businesses.

The survey covered large enterprises across manufacturing, governments, banking, finance and insurance, IT and education sector in ten cities. The survey covered desktops, laptops, servers, enterprise applications, integrated and outsourced IT services and networking products.

In all the categories, product or service quality, and after sales service or support, emerged as the two most important derivatives of satisfaction.

In the desktop vendors category, the top three vendors in terms of customer satisfaction were HP-Compaq, Wipro and HCL. The players who slipped the most included previous year's Top 2 players-IBM/Lenovo dropping from No. 1 to No. 5 due to lower credit period and installation issues and Zenith which dropped from No. 2 to No. 7 due to issues with delivery, problem-solving and pricing clarity.

The Lenovo/IBM laptops remain the favourite among most CIOs having retained its No. 1 position it grabbed in 2006 survey. HP-Compaq and Acer laptops retained the No. 2 and 3 slots. The growing IT-BPO sector, that is witnessing large scale adoption of laptops, is particularly sore with most vendors due to both delivery as well as post sales service dissatisfaction.

The installed base of laptop computers in India is placed at about 1.9 million compared to 20.3 million desktop computers. This translates into a PC penetration of 22 computers per 1000 Indians.

In the large servers category (servers are computer systems that provide services to other computers) the CIOs have voted for IBM, HP-Compaq and HCL as their Top 3 choices.

Networking vendors were included for the first time in the Dataquest-IDC Customer Satisfaction Audit. Here Cisco emerged as the winner followed by D-Link/Foundry and Nortel.

In the enterprise applications category covering Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM), the CIOs chose SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Business Solutions as the Top 3 applications.

In the IT Services arena, the Top 3 suppliers ranked on customer satisfaction were, HCL Comnet, Wipro and HP Services.

About CyberMedia:
CyberMedia is South Asia's first and largest specialty media house, with thirteen publications (including Dataquest, PCQuest, Voice&Data and Global Services) in the infotech, telecom, consumer electronics and biotech areas, and is a media value chain including Internet (www.ciol.com), events and television. The group's media services include market research (IDC India), job board (CyberMedia Dice), content management, multimedia, and media education.

Contact:
Sanjiv Kataria,
Strategic Communications and PR,
+ 91 98100 48095,
Sanjiv.kataria @ gmail.com

Shivik Gupta,
CyberMedia,
+91 (0124) 4031234,
shivikg @ cybermedia.co.in

News Source: Business Wire India