Readers' Choice Awards 2

Here they are: the vendors that won over the readers of Intelligent Enterprise in 2004. Every year, we ask you, the readers, to vote for your favorite vendors in a variety of enterprise IT categories. Unlike in past years, however, this time we asked only some of you to vote. The invitation-only, random-sample ballot was much more successful in attracting legitimate votes and discouraging the perennial vendor attempts to sway the results.

We also added a new feature to this year's ballot: satisfaction ratings. We asked voters to rate the vendors they voted for, along 4 attributes: product, product life cycle, support, and professional services. We gave these criteria equal weight in the composite scores. This new satisfaction score is interesting on its own, but it had side benefits. For one, it let us declare a Customer Satisfaction Star, SAS. It also let us break some ties. In Geographic Information Systems, ESRI and Microsoft tied but for the satisfaction rating that gave ESRI the lead. In the Business Performance Monitoring and Management category, both Cognos and Business Objects took the high score of 16.2%, but Cognos prevailed with an 83% satisfaction rating.

Click Here to view all of the winners.

The votes for the Business Performance Monitoring and Management category show that no one vendor clearly dominates that field. Cognos and Business Objects were closely followed by Oracle in third place. The same can't be said of the Search and Retrieval category. There, Google trounced everyone, taking almost 77% of the vote. A reader from Madison, Wisconsin says that the Google Enterprise Search Appliance was an inexpensive and low-risk temporary solution to use while researching other options. Another reader, Ashok Sahu, praising the technology rather than the price, says that the Google appliance allows extra logic for more permutations in searches.

On the topic of price vs. enterprise functionality, Microsoft swept the Readers' Choice Awards by winning six first-place spots and three second places. Microsoft is clearly more favored among small to midsized enterprises (SMEs, which we defined as having annual revenues of less than $500 million) than among large enterprises, and 60% of the voters were from SMEs. But in most categories where Microsoft won the overall vote, its showing among large enterprises was also substantial. Despite declarations made at the recent LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft still seems to have a healthy grip on the server, not just the desktop.

Contradicting another buzz, the one that says strategic software purchasing is increasing or poised to increase, Intelligent Enterprise readers are saying that maintaining and bolstering existing systems is more important than delving into emerging technology categories such as enterprise service buses and customer data integration.

On the following pages, you'll see a quantitative summary of the results from this year's voting. We encourage your feedback. Please write to me at [email protected].

Additional pricing, contact, and product information is available by clicking the product names below. Or, access the entire chart here.

1. Large enterprise: For the purposes of this poll, we defined the voters' companies as "large enterprise" when those companies were reported by the voter to have annual revenues of $500 million or more, or (if a consultancy) clients with combined revenues of $500 million or more.

2. SME: For the purposes of this poll, we defined the voters' companies as "SME" (small-medium sized enterprise) when those companies were reported by the voter to have annual revenues of less than $500 million, or (if a consultancy) clients with combined revenues of less than $500 million.

3. Satisfaction rating: We asked voters to score their satisfaction with their vendor selection along 4 dimensions: products, product lifecycle, support, and professional services. Each dimension was scored on a scale of 1-5. Blanks or selections of "not applicable" were thrown out of the average.