Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks also receive the highest marks from survey participants for expertise across a range of network services capabilities. But most of the 19 companies studied fall short of customer expectations. Perceptions of the services firm performance according to a selected list of attributes, such as responsiveness to customer needs, are generally well below customer demands, especially for the most important attributes.
Network services is all about performance, and customer expectations continue to rise.
Neither is any company strongly positioned in some of the hottest growth areas in network services, such as e-business solutions and network management. Industry leaders from the hardware side are all racing to build up their more profitable services businesses, but this market remains wide open to challengers. The interviews focused on issues such as brand awareness and favorability of network services firms, market positioning, company attributes, services buyers' goals and priorities, and leading sources of information. All Rights Reserved.