Team CTOF (The CTO Forum magazine) surveyed CIOs under four parameters in 20 enterprise technology categories to determine the MOST TRUSTED IT VENDORS for the year 2008.

The four parameters considered for the survey were Customer Intimacy, Demonstrating Tangible Business Benefits, Domain Expertise and Service & Support.

This is the third year that Team CTOF is conducting this survey on India’s most trusted IT vendors. They surveyed top Indian CIOs from various verticals—BFSI, manufacturing, telecom, retail, utilities, government, IT/ITES, pharma and FMCG.

The survey was conducted on the basis of an emailed questionnaire sent to the selected CIOs. Post this, they did a telephonic interaction with a select group of CIOs, vendor representatives and analysts.

Customer intimacy
A sales pitch and the accompanying hype that goes along with it is no longer impressing CIOs. What technology managers want is customer intimacy—which means helping out an organization with appropriate foresight about emerging technology and business needs. Customer intimacy involves a composite dialogue that involves tracking customer needs and business processes. As the complexity of the buying process considerably goes up, some vendors are expanding their scope of engagement with enterprises to include business heads—and in a few cases, organizational heads—to tailor solutions for enterprises that address all the core demands of the firm.

Demonstrating tangible business benefits
Managements are increasingly demanding that CIOs demonstrate tangible RoI on their IT investments. This has lead to CIOs passing on the RoI debate to IT vendors. In a number of cases, CIOs and IT heads were demanding that vendors present the entire business case behind their IT investments. However, a few smart CIOs are also expanding the scope of the RoI debate by engaging with actual users and the respective business heads while preparing a case. No longer is the IT budget the exclusive domain of the CIO—even business heads have presented the budget, witnessing intensive debate with organizational heads, IT managers and users. IT is hence getting increasingly aligned with business. Firms are also opting for pilot projects because they want to be convinced about the real business benefits of a particular IT solution.

Domain expertise
With increasing competition in each and every vertical, enterprises are looking out for partners who can thoroughly understand their respective domains. Large vendors continue to look out for acquisitions which will help them gain domain expertise in certain business and technology verticals. Some of the most complex and biggest deals have been bagged by certain vendors purely because of their domain knowledge. The adage ‘know thy customer’ has never been more appropriate in this context.

This phenomenon was observed in areas like Business Intelligence and CRM implementation, where enterprises inked contracts with niche vendors with substantial domain expertise.

Service and support
We have observed in the surveys conducted over the past two years that Indian enterprises have been attaching considerable importance to service and support. This year also, the scenario is pretty much the same. This trend is even stronger is larger organizations, where such companies have narrowed down on bigger vendors (with a strong global footprint) because of the latter’s ability to support comprehensive solutions. As was the case last year, large conglomerates with diversified business interests are seeking out partners who can cope with exponential growth.

Team CTOF categorized the winners under three main categories – Enterprise IT Infrastructure, Business Software and IT and Business Management.

Business Software – Business Intelligence

By integrating data from across the enterprise and making it easily accessible to key shareholders, IT can spend less time responding to requests and business users can spend less time looking for information. BI tools help improve the quality of data, put it in better context, provide integration of data and real time viewing in exactly the way required by an organization. A very critical benefit of BI is that it helps to adhere to compliance by keeping data in context and making it easy to retrieve as and when needed.

Over 73 percent of respondents seek partners with high domain expertise and technical know-how. Almost 67 percent of respondents are looking for cross platform integration as a key feature of the BI solution.

MAIA Intelligence, a Microsoft Gold Partner is the only Indian company established in 2006 with a small team of less than 50 is giving a run for money to the multi-billion dollar multinationals in Business Intelligence Software product space.

MAIA Intelligence is just 2% away from second place and 7% away from first.  The winning margin between MAIA Intelligence, first & second winner is very much achievable in coming years with your patronage.

We thank all the CIOs, Customers & Partners for their trust and support !!!
You can read the results of this survey at: http://www.maia-intelligence.com/pdf/MAIA-Most-Trusted-IT-Vendor-The-CTO-Forum-December-2008.pdf

Posted on December 22nd, 2008 by Sanjay Mehta
Filed under: Business Intelligence, CIO Community

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