InformationWeek

December 4, 2000

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Survey Methodology: How Vendors Were Ranked

By Lisa Boomer

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InformationWeek Research created the Analyzing The Vendors series to provide business and technology managers with unbiased customer evaluations of IT products and services. One way of understanding a vendor, its products, and its capabilities is to talk with the company's business customers and hear about their experiences, which is what we've done. These evaluations are intended to help IT buyers in their purchase decisions.

The Analyzing The Vendors series was launched four years ago, with an initial focus on IT services vendors such as research firms and systems integrators. Other published reports in 2000 have included Analyzing The Storage Vendors (Oct. 2, p. 46; infor mationweek.com/806/storage.htm) and Analyzing The E-Services Vendors (Nov. 13, p. 45; information week.com/812/eservices.htm). This week, we look at five relational database vendors: IBM, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase. These studies measure the importance of key buying criteria, as well as customer satisfaction with the vendors themselves.

For this report, more than 700 IT professionals responded to an E-mail invitation to evaluate their relational database vendors. To participate in the study, respondents had to meet two key criteria: They had to be personally involved in the selection or evaluation of their companies' relational database vendors, and their companies had to be partnering with at least one of a specified list of database vendors. In total, 303 respondents qualified to take the survey.

Qualifying respondents evaluated only vendors whose products they're currently using, up to a maximum of three. Each vendor had to achieve a minimum level of 50 completed interviews to ensure stable data analysis. Five vendors made the final cut.

Customers evaluated each provider across 11 selection criteria to measure satisfaction levels in areas such as reliability and availability, scalability, features and innovation, and industry expertise. The attributes were then weighted by InformationWeek Research based on customer preferences about what's important to them in the selection process. An overall customer satisfaction rating was calculated, and each vendor's scores were indexed to 1,000, forming the basis of the overall satisfaction ranking.--Lisa Boomer, Managing Editor, Research