SAP retains the top spot, while last year’s runner up Baan is out of the top three. At No. 2 is Oracle followed by Peoplesoft/JD Edwards.

While arriving at a decision for enterprise applications, the two most important parameters that influence a CIO are product features and the pre sales and marketing. And interestingly, price and commercial terms come across as an attribute that is relatively not as important, and yet the levels of satisfaction on this parameter stand the lowest. SAP’s emergence at the top of the pack is a greater satisfaction score on product attributes. The scores on the pre-sales and marketing parameter are spread not very far apart.

The spread of the overall CSA Index for this category also indicates that the IT industry is a tough one to be in. Baan getting knocked off from the top spot is a result of more than one force. Baan overall performance is lower than the average industry satisfaction score on the CSA 2004 index for enterprise applications, unlike last year where it outperformed the industry average.

A quick look at the index will tell you that Baan in the last year has not been able to achieve even the average industry satisfaction level in any of the parameters that define satisfaction for enterprise applications. Add to that the fact that the process of recovery is has been more aggressive by other players populating the industry. Oracle, for instance, which showed results much below the industry average last year, actually outperforms the industry average this year around.

While the key considerations are product attributes, the relative importance of the second most important feature, pre-sales and marketing, ranks way below the product attributes. This is unlike last year when both of these parameters got an almost equal importance from the CIO.