Numbers Don’t Lie (Vendors Often Do)—WAAS Results from TheInfoPro
TheInfoPro, a leading market survey and analysis firm, has completed its fourth “WAVE report” on enterprise IT spending and priorities. Not suprisingly, WAN optimization came out as a very hot technology focus area: “WAN Data Compression and Acceleration Hardware has overtaken 10 Gbps Ethernet to assume the top spot on the Data Networking Infrastructure Technology Heat Index ®in Wave 4.”
But another interesting point comes up when TheInfoPro looks at specific vendors in the market…
When TheInfoPro gets into detail on what their respondents said about different vendors, the results are quite interesting: “Riverbed continues to appear in a strong position, but has lost its designation as the lead in plan vendor in this segment to Cisco…Cisco now leads among both F1000 and MSE organization for mentions in consideration….”
So if that’s the case per non-vendor funded TheInfoPro research, then how do recent #‘s from other vendors come out like this: “Riverbed’s top two competitors remain Cisco (competing in 40% of customer decisions) and Juniper (competing in 23% of customer decisions). Riverbed continues to maintain a 90% win rate against all of its competitors.
Source: CNN Money pick up of Riverbed announcement.
Especially when TheInfoPro’s prior WAVE 3 report (July 2007) also stated Cisco had become the lead vendor under consideration.
Are Cisco and other vendors winning a lot of “non competitive deals”, like some recent vendor blog posting have suggested…or are those vendors’ win analyses not as accurate as they could be? Since Cisco has 2500+ customers, and other vendors besides Riverbed have their base too, any “90%+ number” seems a little circumspect, large market oppty aside…but we’ll leave that to your own judgement, blog posts and future TheInfoPro and other firms’ reports.
Posted by Mark Weiner at 01:03AM PST
The Quiet Man Apr 18, 2008
Mark -
Since when did Cisco change its marketing to “All Ballmer, All the time”. Give it a rest already. You are Cisco. Act like it. Attempt to make better products, leverage your superior distribution channel, bundle it all on the router, and be done with it. Let the market decide.
The Quiet Man