Companies often use a metric called Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a measure of loyalty, as it calculates the likelihood that customers will recommend a company to friends and colleagues.

In a new report, “Tech Vendor NPS Benchmark, 2017,” the Temkin Group (www.TemkinGroup.com) analyzed NPS of 58 tech vendors based on feedback from 800 IT decision makers within large North American companies. NPS can range from a low of -100 to a high of +100. With an NPS of 43, Microsoft servers came out with the top score, followed by SAS Institute, Google, and VMware.
At the other end of the spectrum, four tech vendors have NPS below 0: Accenture, Affiliated Computer Services, Autodesk, and Fujitsu.

This is the sixth year that Temkin Group has completed the NPS study. The average NPS dropped from 29.9 last year to 21.4 this year, the lowest level across the six years.

"We found a wide range of Net Promoter Scores across tech vendors, and a strong connection between that metric and the loyalty of IT professionals," states Bruce Temkin, managing partner of the Temkin Group.

In addition to benchmarking NPS, the research examines several areas of loyalty that large companies have for their tech vendors. The Temkin Group found that IT decision-makers are most likely to purchase more from Microsoft and HP, try new offerings from Microsoft and Google, forgive SAS and Microsoft if they make a mistake, and act as a reference for Apple and IBM SPSS.