Today the analyst firm Aberdeen Group announced its list of the 100 most influential technology vendors for 2008. It’s bizarre. The full list, courtesy of Aberdeen, is below. And maybe you can’t blame the analyst firm for what respondents told them, but it certainly seems to me that respondents lost sight of the “business influence” element, and just picked their favourite or most familiar brands.
So here are a few ‘bizarrelights’:
+ Check Point, one of the most profitable security players (latest quarterly revenue $191.6m), is only in at number 100, below companies I have hardly heard of.
+ Apple is at number 16 – remember Aberdeen looked for “the Top 100 organizations that excelled at providing value to the business community”. How many enterprises have Apple investments that put Apple’s influence above the next 84 companies in the list?
+ Skype is at number 55 – how many companies see the influence of Skype in their enterprise? Skype is more influential in the enterprise than Symantec? NetApp? Informatica? Do me a favour.
+ Vonage is at 68. See Skype above.
+ Google is only at number 11, behind salesforce.com [salesforce.com latest quarterly revenue $217m, Google latest quarterly revenue $5.2bn. And don’t even start on the fact Google is less relevant in the enterprise, because not only do they have numerous enterprise offerings these days but their influence on consumers has affected the IT expectations of nearly every employee in any company.]
+ Ariba is at number 38 (revenue in latest quarter $80.5m), above people like CA (latest quarterly results $1.1bn), Tata, Novell, BMC, Progress and many more.
Content from our partners
Now while I understand that people’s perception of influence is not the same as these companies’ actual success or lack of it, the size of the discrepancy between perceived influence and actual results – and the more sales a company has, the more customers they must have and the more investment those companies are making in their products – is pretty astonishing, in my view.
But that’s the fun thing about this kind of list: it is enlightening, surprising and infuriating in equal measure. Hit continue reading to see the full list of the Top 100 and more…
…Here’s the list of the Top 100 organizations that excelled at providing value to the business community, courtesy of Aberdeen.
1. Microsoft
2. Oracle
3. SAP
4. IBM
5. Cisco
6. Hewlett Packard
7. Dell
8. Salesforce.com
9. EMC
10. Sun Microsystems
11. Google
12. RIM (Blackberry)
13. Siemens
14. Adobe
15. AT&T
16. Apple
17. Sage
18. Infor
19. Nortel
20. Avaya
21. Red Hat
22. Motorola
23. Verizon Wireless
24. Dassault
25. Accenture
26. Sony Ericsson
27. Alcatel – Lucent
28. AutoDesk
29. Intel
30. SAS
31. Citrix
32. Nokia
33. PTC
34. Lawson
35. i2
36. EDS
37. QAD
38. Ariba
39. CA
40. Epicor
41. Juniper
42. Sprint/Nextel
43. Tata Consulting
44. ADP
45. Fujitsu
46. Intuit
47. Manhattan Associates
48. Novell
49. Red Prairie
50. SunGard
51. Telstra
52. BMC
53. BT
54. CSC
55. Skype
56. Infosys
57. NetApp
58. Symantec
59. Huawei
60. IFS
61. Microstrategy
62. Aruba
63. CDW
64. Concur
65. Exact
66. Hitachi
67. Qlikview
68. Vonage
69. Xerox
70. Front Range
71. Internec
72. Manugistics
73. Palm
74. Unisys
75. Yahoo!
76. 3com
77. ABB
78. CANON
79. Capgemini
80. Informatica
81. Interwoven
82. McKesson
83. Mincom
84. Mitel
85. Netsuite
86. Omniture
87. Progress
88. Rackspace
89. SPSS
90. Syntel
91. Teradata
92. T-Mobile
93. Toshiba
94. Websense
95. Servigistics
96. Genesys
97. Logility
98. Kronos
99. Rockwell Automation
100. Checkpoint Systems
The analyst firm says its research spanned “5 years, 550,000 locations, and over 2.5 million interviews.” Maybe not so many of those interviews were with people that actually pay for IT investments? If they were, it seems likely they would have a different list that more closely reflects the actual investments made by companies in technology. Have your say – hit comment below.
One final note: on the landing page for the fuller version of the 2008 State of the Market Research Report, Aberdeen states: “The 2008 Aberdeen Report truely is the definitive study for Best-in-Class businesses around the world.” Now that is “truely” reassuring!
Disclosure thing: I’m only taking the mickey but worth pointing out my magazine is part of the Datamonitor Group, a rival analyst firm to Aberdeen. And yes, my magazine has been known to make the odd typo too!
