The enterprise software industry has been warned that apart from focusing on cost, benefit and ROI, vendors should worry about how easy they are to work with or making simple licensing rules.
In a joint Flexera Software and IDC survey, enterprises were asked if they agree or disagree with a series of statements regarding Adobe, CA, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Symantec and VMWare.
EMC won the accolade of being the easiest vendor to work with by 91% of respondents. Oracle scored last, with 43% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing.
Citrix won the most awards as 88% of those surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that Citrix’ licensing rules around mobile, virtualisation and the cloud will better facilitate their migration to those environments.
Nearly 100% (94%) said they rarely face software license compliance audits from Citrix and 87% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed the company offers reasonably priced software that provides good ROI.
VMware was awarded with ‘vendor’s applications are easy to manage, apply patches, maintain and upgrade’ by 91% of respondents and also with ‘it is easy for enterprises to understand and manage their usage of and spend for this vendor’s applications’ award (93%).
Almost nine out of ten (89.8%) of those surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that HP’s licensing rules are easy to understand, making it easy to maintain compliance, with Citrix being the runner up with 89.6%.
HP also won consent from 93% of companies as it was voted the company that rarely forces them to pay true up fees.
Oracle scored last on every category of the Customer Choice Awards, which surveyed 147 enterprises.
Amy Konary, Research VP – Software Licensing and Provisioning at IDC said: "The impact that enterprise software has on an organisation goes beyond a simple question of whether it delivers the desired business outcome.
"Applications require ongoing effort and cost to manage, support and maintain throughout the lifecycle of the license. The ease with which organisations can support those applications, and partner with their application providers during the process has a dramatic impact on vendors’ favourability ratings."
Richard Northing, Senior VP of Products and Services at Flexera Software said: "Building great products that deliver ROI is and should be the primary driver for every software vendor. However, this report suggests that software companies must also look downstream and optimise the customer experience across a wide range of value criteria.
"Ease of management, remaining in license compliance, upgrading and migrations – are just a few of the factors that have very real impact on organisations’ ability to support their applications, and therefore on their overall opinion of their software vendors."
