Business apps and services vendors get bad reputation

Return on investment is not satisfactory

Firms are failing to get satisfactory returns on their investments in enterprise applications and IT services contracts, a new IT Week survey has found.

Of the 10 IT services providers rated, Hewlett-Packard was ranked top, with 71 percent of its customers satisfied with the return on investment from its service offerings. However, many of the other firms fell significantly short of this rating. IBM and Fujitsu were the only other services providers achieving good satisfaction levels in this area with more than half of their customers, while only around a third of Cap Gemini and Accenture customers were satisfied with the returns from their investments.

Firms are facing similar problems in getting value from their business applications purchases. While Novell was rated top with almost two-thirds of its customers happy with the returns offered, under half of firms were satisfied with the benefits from investments in Siebel, SAP and BMC products.

The 5,200 IT and finance executives questioned were much happier with their security, telecoms, storage and hardware suppliers, however. Each of the suppliers in these areas managed to satisfy more than half of their customers for return on investment, while several vendors achieved scores of 80 percent or more.

James Burckhardt, head of research at IT Week publisher VNU, pointed out that satisfaction levels with application and service vendors have traditionally been below average. “The more commoditised a sector the easier it seems to be to deliver higher customer satisfaction,” he said. “So high complexity application vendors seem to suffer as well as the service vendors, particularly those involved in the most major IT outsourcing deals.”