Posted by : bpburnwal on Oct 09, 2003 - 11:45 AM General

A bitter battle is hotting up between IT service providers and top-tier technology vendors in the competitive and fragmented global IT services market.
According to a recent survey by Gartner of 197 buyers and influencers of IT services, a strong brand can play an important role in differentiating a company from the rest of the pack.

The analyst firm's research aimed to determine which brands were most closely associated with specific categories of IT professional services: business and IT consulting; systems development and integration; IT outsourcing; and business process outsourcing.

The results showed that IBM, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft ranked in the top 10 in terms of first to mind and total unaided responses in the business and IT consulting category, even though they are not strong in business consulting.

IBM was the dominant brand, in terms of both first to mind and total unaided awareness, in three of the four categories.

"For providers entering the market, or established and/or boutique players that have historically foregone brand building, there is still plenty of mind share to be had," said Christine Adams, principal analyst at Gartner.

"Outside IBM, no single provider overwhelmingly dominated any categories tested."

The research also found that leading Indian offshore providers commanded a large degree of unaided awareness.

Survey participants mentioned five India-based companies across the four services categories presented in the study: Infosys Technologies, Patni Computer Systems, Satyam Computer Services, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies.