Some notable election results were just released today, and the incumbent won big.
When doing some market research a few months back, I got to meet a key guy behind IT Brand Pulse, Frank Berry. He's a Senior Analyst there, as well as frequent blogger on InfoStor, Network Computing, and a few other sites. So I went back to him to hear about this survey. "The highest score in the 2010 Blade Server Brand Leader Survey was in the market leadership category, where HP was selected by 62.1% of the IT professionals who responded. That’s over 43% more than the second place vendor, “ Frank said. The key to the market leadership category for blades, he said, was perceived innovation leadership. "The second highest gap between leader and second place was in the innovation category where HP received 45% of the votes, over 21% more than the second place vendor.”
HP's blade story attracts attention when analysts like IDC and Gartner give HP BladeSystem high ratings. However, the story becomes compelling when end-users themselves set the rankings (like how JD Powers scores consumer products, or what Nielsen does for media).
Frank says his company does surveys each month on different topics -- for example, they recently looked at Converged Network Adapters [pdf]. For a given technology, IT professionals choose leaders for five different categories: price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation. They also pick an overall market leader.
There's been talk recently about who's number three when it comes to blade servers. But there's no debate about who's number one -- that election is over.
