The Top 100 Tech Vendors of 2008

A ranking of the Top 100 technology vendors could be created any number of ways. The vendors could be ranked by total sales, by market share, or by current growth rates, among other methods.

The Aberdeen Group created its own list (see below) by soliciting opinion from the experts most closely involved with these vendors: executives whose firms use their products or services.

Andrew Boyd, the chief research officer for Aberdeen, explained: “We asked respondents to identify the top 3 technology companies that had the most influence on their business in the past year.” Aberdeen received some 4,600 responses from IT managers and executives. The survey was part of its annual State of the Market report.

“We took the 3 responses, tabulated it up, and this list was the result,” Boyd told me.

The very top of the list will surprise no one who follows technology. “The top 10 are roughly mapped to other lists you’ve probably seen out in the market place,” Boyd said. But the list does contain plenty of counterintuitive entries.

In particular, Boyd pointed to the high placement of Google, RIM, and Apple – the personal technologies on the list. The merging of consumer and business technology is clearly continuing, as IT staffers organize their life – and connect to the Net – via their smartphones.

It’s also interesting to see Salesforce among the top entries. In comparison to the entrenched top titans, the SaaS company is a relative newcomer, not having launched its service until 2000. (None of the other Top 10 are less than 20 years old.)

SaaS is inarguably a strongly emerging trend. Noted Boyd:
“We asked, ‘In a broad sense, what technologies do you think are going to have the most impact in the business in the next 3-5 years? Interestingly enough, BI and analytics was No. 1, and Software as a Service was No. 2.” That bodes well for up-and-coming SaaS vendor Netsuite, currently at No. 85.

Also somewhat surprising about the list: open source vendor Red Hat (No. 21) is ranked above industry power Intel (No. 29). And VoIP phone company Vonage (No. 68) is ranked just above blue chip brand name Xerox (No. 69). The times they are a-changin’.

Aberdeen’s full list of the Top 100 Most Influential Technology vendors of 2008:

1. Microsoft

2. Oracle

3. SAP

Andrew Boyd

4. IBM

5. Cisco

6. Hewlett Packard

7. Dell

8. Salesforce.com

9. EMC

10. Sun Microsystems

11. Google

12. RIM (Blackberry)

13. Siemens

14. Adobe

15. AT&T

16. Apple

17. Sage

18. Infor

19. Nortel

20. Avaya

21. Red Hat

22. Motorola

23. Verizon Wireless

24. Dassault

25. Accenture

26. Sony Ericsson

27. Alcatel – Lucent

28. AutoDesk

29. Intel

30. SAS

31. Citrix

32. Nokia

33. PTC

34. Lawson

35. i2

36. EDS

37. QAD

38. Ariba

39. CA

40. Epicor

41. Juniper

42. Sprint/Nextel

43. Tata Consulting

44. ADP

45. Fujitsu

46. Intuit

47. Manhattan Associates

48. Novell

49. Red Prairie

50. SunGard

51. Telstra

52. BMC

53. BT

54. CSC

55. Skype

56. Infosys

57. NetApp

58. Symantec

59. Huawei

60. IFS

61. Microstrategy

62. Aruba

63. CDW

64. Concur

65. Exact

66. Hitachi

67. Qlikview

68. Vonage

69. Xerox

70. Front Range

71. Internec

72. Manugistics

73. Palm

74. Unisys

75. Yahoo!

76. 3com

77. ABB

78. CANON

79. Capgemini

80. Informatica

81. Interwoven

82. McKesson

83. Mincom

84. Mitel

85. Netsuite

86. Omniture

87. Progress

88. Rackspace

89. SPSS

90. Syntel

91. Teradata

92. T-Mobile

93. Toshiba

94. Websense

95. Servigistics

96. Genesys

97. Logility

98. Kronos

99. Rockwell Automation

100. Checkpoint Systems

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