Get our report on LAN Equipment Vendors, free with registration See all our Reports The LAN switch has always been the workhorse of corporate networks, and that's not about to change: Companies are supporting more traffic-generating multimedia, like VoIP and video. A diverse range of devices, such as IP phones and security cameras, need configuration and power. And there's a push by security teams to differentiate between corporate- and user-owned gadgets.

Given that, we wanted to gauge IT's preferences for LAN equipment vendors, delve into buying criteria such as performance and cost, and see who best delivers on table-stakes features like port density and management software. Our InformationWeek LAN Equipment Vendor IT Pro Ranking Survey drew responses from 444 IT pros, all of whom use and evaluate LAN equipment.

While we asked about 14 vendors, only six--Brocade, Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Juniper, and Netgear--garnered enough responses to qualify for assessment in our full report, which is available free with registration at informationweek.com/reports/ lanranking. For that select group, we asked respondents to rate the relative importance of 11 criteria on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest score; the result is an overall composite ranking. Cisco had a good showing, pulling a 4.4 out of 5 for product reliability. No other vendor scored as high, though HP and Juniper came close, each earning a 4. Cisco also took the top spot for performance, with a 4.2. Only Cisco and Juniper broke the 4.0 mark in this ...