Cisco, Brocade and Juniper are top scorers in enterprise n/ws, as per Infonetics

Date: 12/08/2013
Market research firm Infonetics Research has ranked Cisco, Brocade and Juniper as top three enterprise networking vendors bases on multiple performance parameters. The 8 vendors analyzed in the 25-page report include Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, HP, Juniper, NEC and Siemens Enterprise.

Infonetics has rated the top 500 enterprise networking vendors based on market share, share momentum, financial performance, and solutions mix. Infonetics has put that list on its website for a limited time period. The scorecard list is available at free of charge at http://www.infonetics.com/download.asp?id=36.

“More than 100 vendors are vying for a piece of the $50 billion enterprise networking and communication infrastructure market, but only 8 have a diverse product offering and consistently capture more than 1% market share,” observes Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video at Infonetics Research and lead author of the report. “Our enterprise scorecard helps buyers make accurate comparisons among vendors based on commonly-used purchase criteria and identify which vendors are most suitable for their organization’s specific requirements.“

Machowinski adds: “Cisco leads this field by a wide margin, claiming a perfect score in 6 out of the 7 criteria that we measure in our enterprise vendor scorecard. But the battle for 2nd place remains heavily contested, as witnessed by the tie this year between Brocade and Juniper.”

The highlights of enterprise score card includes:
Aside from Cisco, for the most part vendor scores fall into a narrow range; a notable exception is financial stability, where there is significant variability in scores
Brocade strongly improved its ranking this year due to improvements in financials, market share momentum and buyer perception
Juniper maintained its score from last year, as improvements in solution breadth and buyer perception were offset by weaker financials
HP ranks 2nd in 5 out of 7 criteria but slid into 4th place overall due to slowing market share momentum and weakening financials
The core business of the other 4 vendors analyzed in the report — Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, NEC and Siemens Enterprise — revolves around the PBX market, which has been slow to recover from the recession, limiting their financial stability and growth prospects
That said, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya and Siemens offer some of the most extensive product portfolios, and NEC’s early work on software-defined networking (SDN) could bring up its technology innovation scores next year