HP Tops Datapro Server Satisfaction Survey

• 02/03/1999

Hewlett-Packard Co. leapfrogged Dell Computer Corp. for first place in an annual survey of customer satisfaction with PC servers done by GartnerGroup (www.gartner.com). Compaq Computer Corp., the leader in market share for sales of servers running Windows NT, moved up from fourth place in 1997 to third place in 1998.

Gartner’s Datapro division (www.datapro.com) conducted the second annual survey of PC server customers in the third quarter of 1998. The 753 respondents were mostly CIOs and IT managers, and all are based in the United States. The 1997 survey was worldwide, but the questions were kept similar to make comparisons valid.

Most of the respondents were running Windows NT on their PC servers. Nearly 53 percent of the respondents had NT installed compared with 47 percent the year before. Installations of Novell Inc.’s NetWare were down nearly 10 percent from 1997 to 31 percent.

Respondents were asked to rate their overall satisfaction with their PC server hardware on a scale of one to five. This year, customer’s gave HP a 4.02, Dell a 3.98, Compaq a 3.88 and IBM Corp. a 3.86. IBM’s rating was numerically higher than the previous year, but was not enough to prevent the vendor from dropping to fourth place, from third in 1997.

"Hewlett Packard's Netservers received the highest scores in the most categories: performance, expandability/upgradability, reliability of the hardware, service and support, and total cost of ownership," said Jane Wright, research director for Datapro’s enterprise system service, in a statement. "Dell's PowerEdge servers scored highest in the categories of initial price, ease of ordering, and ease of installation."

In terms of market share, a study of server revenue for the third quarter of 1998 by International Data Corp. (www.idc.com) placed Compaq in the lead with 29 percent, followed by Dell’s 12 percent, HP’s 11 percent and IBM’s 9 percent.

Overall customer satisfaction with their servers increased slightly from 3.89 in 1997 to 3.91 in 1998, the Datapro survey found. Hardware reliability ranked number one in importance by customers when purchasing a server. The survey revealed that initial price, performance as demonstrated by publicized benchmark results and predicted total cost of ownership are other important considerations. The results revealed that customers were more satisfied with the reliability of their servers than any other aspect. Satisfaction with reliability was partly due to the fact that the majority of respondents used servers that had less than 12 hours of unplanned downtime per year and less than 12 hours of planned downtime per year.