On Premise Giants and AWS Trade Blows in IT Brand Leader Surveys

IT Brand Pulse recently completed two rounds of annual brand leader surveys covering 7 types of products which are available for deployment on-premise, or as a cloud service. For each product, data center IT pros were asked who they perceived as market, price, performance, reliability, service & support, and innovation leader. 

CSP vs. CSP

 The first round of surveys pitted cloud service provider against cloud service provider. Not surprisingly, AWS dominated the voting and swept all six brand leader awards for cloud backup, dedicated servers, enterprise-class storage, SSD storage, and virtual servers as-a-service. But VMware and Microsoft struck blows for traditional enterprise IT vendors by sweeping the brand leader awards for virtual desktops and unified communications as-a-service. While the surveys were an impressive showing by AWS, Microsoft and VMware demonstrated it’s possible to win against AWS with best-in-class cloud services.

The Best of the Best: On Premise vs. Cloud Service

 In the second round of surveys, IT pro voters were presented with an extensive list of on premise vendors plus cloud service providers for each product category. Familiar enterprise data center infrastructure vendors were chosen as market leaders in every product category. However, AWS counter-punched with superior pricing, support, and innovation to get on the leaderboard.

Why Old Guys (on premise brands) Rule

The reason on premise brands still rule is because the vast majority of enterprise IT professionals would simply prefer to buy on-premise equipment. As you can see below, almost 60% of respondents preferred to buy on-premise capital. The second most responses were for on premise-as-a-service.

And the reason why enterprise IT prefers on premise products (aside from the obvious job security issues which we’re not addressing here) is because they believe they can built a better performing, more reliable and more secure environment.

On Premise vs. CSP Market Leader Survey Results

Below are the results of voting for Market Leader. Click here to view or download a PDF of the full Cloud and On-Premise 2016 Brand Leader Survey Mini-Report on SlideShare.

Enterprise IT believes HPE, the world’s largest server vendor, is the overall market leader for dedicated servers. AWS is a close second and VMware is a surprising third.

As in every other survey we’ve done covering virtual server technology, VMware owns the hearts and minds of Enterprise IT.

Storage giant EMC is considered the overall market leader, but AWS is not far behind.

On premise vendors ran 1, 2, and 3 in voting for SSD storage market leader. Is it because you can see and touch it in your own data center?EMC and Veeam tied in voting for backup and archive market leader. The strong showing by Veeam underscores the genius of their marketing messaging focused on virtual machine backup.

Just like virtual servers, VMware has a stranglehold on IT perceptions of virtual desktop leadership.

Cisco, the masters of convergence, defined the market for unified communications. Excellent products and their powerful marketing machine won’t let IT pros forget.

Pyrrhic Victory

Unlike all other press releases which are chocked full of vendor quotes, not a single on premise winner wanted to provide a quote for the press release announcing these winners. Apparently being labeled as an on premise vendor inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat.

We’re looking at conducting additional on premise vs. CSP surveys in the future. Let me know if you found this data interesting, and if there are any product categories you’d like to see us cover.

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