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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
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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
