“This finding surprised us in a world dominated by the web,” said Steven Foster, EMEA managing director at Siemon. “But the UK does have the broadest and hence most tailored IT printed media. This information gives us better insight into how end users gather information prior to a purchasing decision.”
“Word of mouth is also confirmed to be valued in the UK, where personal relationships and referral or recommendation are often influential” he said. “Given that over 70 per cent of the survey respondents were working within organisations with over 10,000 employees, it suggests that one-to-one communication is just as important at global corporate level as it is in the SME market which often adopts a less traditional approach to decision making.
The focus for the Siemon research was to establish the priorities in network cabling choices amongst a cross section of end users. The multi-sector survey reported that quality/performance, bandwidth and lifecycle respectively were the factors considered of greatest importance. Respondents included IT managers, consultants, networking teams and project managers. Over 70 per cent of this group rated network cabling to be very important.
According to Siemon, the research population was asked to rank the IT issues of security, compliance, environment, global standardisation and cost reduction. Of these security topped the polls and the most common additional issues named by respondents were liability and outsourcing.
The survey asked respondents to order the factors they considered when choosing a cabling company. Quality was the clear priority, with 80 per cent scoring this as ‘very relevant’. Interestingly, price was scored as often as a priority as not of importance, with an exactly tied vote.