The Temkin Group (www.TempkinGroup.com) has published its annual “Product and Relationship Satisfaction of IT Clients,” which rates 62 technology vendors based on feedback from 800 IT decision makers within large North American organizations.

At the top of the ratings, six tech vendors earned average satisfaction levels of 70% or more across the eight areas:  HPE outsourcing (76%), Google (75%), IBM SPSS (75%), IBM software (73%), IBM outsourcing (70%), and Dell outsourcing (70%). At the bottom of the ratings, five vendors earned average satisfaction levels below 50%: Trend Micro (42%), Infosys (46%), SunGard (47%), Pitney Bowes (48%), and Cognizant (49%).

"Large enterprises depend a lot on all of these tech vendors, but there's a wide gap in how effectively the vendors meet the needs of their customers," states Bruce Temkin, managing partner of Temkin Group.

The research examines eight areas of satisfaction; four that deal with products & services and four that examine relationships. Tech vendors earned the highest average satisfaction level for product features (64%) and the lowest for total cost of ownership (57%).

The average satisfaction rating is 61%, the same level as last year. Of the eight criteria we looked at, product/service ease of use and features increased the most, each going up by about two percentage-points since last year. Innovation declined the least, dropping by two percentage-points. Here are the leaders across the four areas of product/service satisfaction:

° Features: IBM SPSS (79%), IBM software (79%), and HPE outsourcing (79%).

° Quality: Google (80%), VMware (76%), and IBM software (76%).

° Flexibility: Google (78%), Dell outsourcing (77%), IBM IT services (72%), and IBM software (72%).

° Ease of use: IBM SPSS (80%), Google (77%), and Dell outsourcing (75%).
Here are the leaders across the four areas of relationship satisfaction:

° Tech support: IBM software (75%), IBM SPSS (73%), and Software AG (73%).

° Account team support: HPE outsourcing (79%), IBM SPSS (74%), and IBM outsourcing (72%).

° Total cost of ownership: HPE outsourcing (79%), Google (72%), IBM software (70%), Dell outsourcing (70%), and IBM SPSS (70%).