Years ago, I used to survey users every year on a variety of network and IT topics. That eventually proved to be time-consuming and difficult to justify in terms of return, but I still gather some of the information through regular exchanges with enterprises. Included in these are both many from the original survey base I’d used, and also from new user connections through the Andover Intel program of outreach to users.
The goal of these surveys was both to identify what users were doing (or proposing) and what influenced their decisions. One of the regular elements of the latter was a survey of vendor influence. This was important to me because knowing how vendors influence buyers, combined with vendor marketing directions and product strategies, is essential in making longer-term market predictions. In the “what are you doing” category, I was interested in how closely buyer activity matched media market commentary.
I don’t have the same kind of organized detail today because I no longer do formal surveys, but I’ve found that the informal data I collect on the same topics provides a similar level of useful insight. That’s why I’m going to summarize it today.
What influences enterprise buyers? Two decades ago, the answer was a combination of the experience of peers in similar organizations, and a few highly trusted media sources. Today, the top influence, cited as first by 78% of buyers, is the product strategies of their dominant vendors. Even the views of trusted peers falls a somewhat disappointing second, cited as first by only 20% of buyers (the remaining are too divided to represent statistical significance). While there is a little variation in these numbers depending on whether you’re talking IT or networking, these averages are close for both activities.
Over the same period, though, networking has lost strategic influence to IT. If we go back far enough (35 years) we’d find that IBM was listed as having the greatest strategic influence on buyers. IBM’s lead gradually shrunk, and at roughly 15 years ago, Cisco and IBM were rivals in the top spot. This corresponded to the high water mark of network strategic influence, and I think the reason is that the middle period of the past 35 years represented a time when delivery of information to users was the limiting factor, and that’s a network mission. Today, the focus is again on creating useful information, and today IBM is gaining again. So is VMware, and Microsoft, but all of these are now behind the Big Two of the cloud, Amazon and Microsoft AWS.
The reality of 2023 is that public cloud giants are now framing IT policy. Even twenty years ago, enterprises told me that data center strategy, which was really application strategy, was the strongest influence on their IT and networking directions. Today application strategy is increasingly driven by the cloud. Even though moving applications to the cloud is one of those urban myths, the incremental development efforts relating to applications and empowerment are cloud-linked. So network strategy equals cloud strategy.
What does this mean for network vendors? Not necessarily as much as you might think. Strategic directions in networking may drive overall planning and budget trends, but building networks is still largely driven by those vendors. Cisco is the dominant influence on enterprise network-building down at the practical purchasing level, but they’re not considered innovation leaders. In fact, their ranking on innovation has gradually slipped over the last 15 years, not a lot per year but enough. You could argue that the ascendance of the cloud players may have helped Cisco by making strategy less important in network product decisions, making strategic vendor status less important.
Tactical network thinking also seems to favor IT vendors who also provide network equipment. Dell and HPE both show a slow gain in their rankings, which suggests that the portion of applications that stay in the data center are still influencing network purchases too, and favoring vendors who can supply the hosting and platform software. User comments do suggest, though, that these moves may be more about filling an influence gap than proving that either Dell or HPE has created a real advantage in the space.
Juniper is an interesting player in all of this. The company has been consistently behind Cisco in overall strategic influence, but over the last four years (and the last three in particular) it’s gained a lot of ground in the category of “innovation”, where it now beats its rival with 69% of enterprises saying that Juniper is “more innovative”. It would be interesting for me (and likely for others) to understand why this hasn’t had a major impact on Juniper’s overall strategic influence, but I didn’t get enough user comments on that to have any statistically significant results to share. Juniper does appear far less often in trade articles than Cisco, and that may account for it; media visibility counts a lot with senior management, as the fascination of that group with generative AI demonstrates.
The generative AI angle may be relevant here for another reason, which is that Juniper is the vendor most-often cited as having a useful network AI toolkit. In fact, Juniper is the only network vendor who gets any real respect in that area, if you limit the responses to enterprises who actually use a network AI tool. IBM is the vendor who’s cited most often for IT/software AI tools and skills, by the way.
Speaking of skills, 92% of enterprises told me that they had “difficulties acquiring and retaining key technical personnel”, with the majority of those saying this was because of competition from vendors and startups. Despite the downturn in Silicon Valley, only 9% of enterprises saw any relief from this problem in the last two months. These numbers are well over 20% higher than they’d been fifteen years ago. Not only that, 100% of enterprise planners and technologists say that “senior management lacks understanding of key technical developments” and that this hampers their attempts to get important projects approved. Are we seeing a growing skill and comfort gap developing? It seems like we are.
Given that media coverage of technology is almost completely driven by vendor initiatives, why would vendors let this sort of thing develop? The answer, as I’ve suggested in the past, is that vendors are interested in making their current-quarter numbers, and educational sells (even those that might pay off in the long term) are likely to lengthen sales cycles, which no vendor wants to see. Sales is replacing marketing even as vendors control marketing channels. Go figure.
To a degree at least, this problem is inevitable. Both businesses and consumers are far more dependent on technology than ever before, technology is moving faster than ever before, and senior management came up at a time when little we think is important today even existed. But it’s deeper than that; even technical professionals tell me, by a 3:1 margin, that they find it difficult to keep up with the developments in their field. Certifications, which have largely replaced the media as the source of technical insight, are themselves often behind the curve of tech development. They also tend to be biased by vendor strategies; if you train buyers, do you train them to want things that aren’t on your roadmap?
We are struggling a bit in terms of technology. Enterprises are under pressure to increase profits to boost stock prices, and that puts costs under pressure. Projects to enhance productivity are getting harder to find because they now require broad changes in both technology and work practices, and even coordinating all the pieces of that puzzle requires considerable cross-technology skill. This isn’t a time when enterprises have easy access to the job market for those skills, either. What do they want? A vendor who has the answers, and whose answers they trust. You get 100% support from enterprises on those points. When you ask who that vendor might be, the answer that you get most often is “IBM”. Are we going back to a bygone tech era? Could be.
