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It takes a lot to make a CIO happy these days: he's a tough negotiator, and very demanding of RoI and service. And there are at least two big upsets in the charts. But it's still product features, support, and delivery and installation, not price, that continue to drive enterprise buying decisions-and customer satisfaction. Keeping our focus on the IT industry, Dataquest-IDC India comes out with the third edition of the CSA. Satisfaction ratings have come to occupy a very important place in the marketers' arsenal of tools when reaching out to a prospective customer and this is precisely what the CSA tries to unfold. CSA 2005 tries to gauge the levels of satisfaction across five key categories, desktops, notebooks, servers, enterprise applications and IT services.

Desktops

Product and post sales services continue to be the key derivatives of CIO satisfaction. However, the level of satisfaction on the latter is the lowest and vendors need to spend more time and energy to ensure that CIO satisfaction level moves up. It is interesting to note that the importance of price and commercials, which had fallen from grace last year, has gone up significantly indicating that in a market where there is not much price differential, CIOs are actually looking at squeezing the last bit from the vendors in terms of price. CIOs, however, continue to have low satisfaction levels on the same, with the exception for the Indian price warrior Zenith. All other parameters, excluding products, have shown lower scores compared to last year. This is indicative of a trend that CIOs have taken most of these issues for granted and expect reasonable QoS on them.

The Desktops Scorecard Rank-05 Rank-04 Dell 1 7 HP 2 3 HCL 3 1 Zenith 4 4 IBM 5 6 Assembled 6 5 Wipro 7 2

The overall satisfaction delivered by vendors lies within a very thin range indicating the stiff competition in this segment. Interestingly, Dell, which was at the bottom of the CSA scorecard last year, finds itself right on top across all major parameters as well as the overall rankings. HCL on pre sales and marketing, HP on delivery and installation and Zenith on price are the respective toppers.

So how did Dell come from behind and top the list this year? Clearly, it's CIOs were more satisfied with respect to the top two parameters-product and post sales services, which account for over 50% of their satisfaction score. The satisfaction level for Dell was way above the industry level. Even in the context of the product parameter, Dell topped the charts on two key sub-parameters, product reliability and technology behind the product. Also in the past one year, Dell has been trying hard to do away with the perception that service is the only major issue. While it has joined hands with the likes of Wipro for post sale service, it has also successfully delivered the message that 'spares' are not an issue. Last year's topper, HCL Infosystems, slipped two places while HP inched up by one place.

Unlike CSA 2004, where players like IBM, Dell, Zenith and the assembled players were below the industry average; CSA 2005 has only two players below the industry average-Wipro and the assembled players.

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Methodology

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