Infonetics on Wednesday said Cisco, Brocade and Juniper top its enterprise networking vendor scorecard.
Cisco leads this field by a wide margin with 6 out of the 7 criteria.
There was a tie between Brocade and Juniper.
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.
“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 percent market share,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video at Infonetics Research.
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.
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.
Infonetics said its 2013 Enterprise Networking and Communication Vendor Leadership Scorecard analyzed 8 vendors including Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, HP, Juniper, NEC and Siemens Enterprise.
The scorecard evaluates datacom vendors on criteria using actual data and metrics, such as direct feedback from buyers, vendor market share, share momentum, financials and solution portfolio. This approach eliminates subjective scoring and ensures vendors are assessed accurately and fairly.
