Microsoft heads list of tech giants supplying CIOs

Microsoft still leads the way as the most-cited supplier to CIOs in the UK, with 57% the latest CIO 100 naming the Redmond-based company as one of their main providers in a list dominated by technology powerhouses Oracle, HP, IBM, SAP and networking giant BT.

Last year Microsoft was named by 55%of IT executives as leading supplier representing a small increase.

Despite the threat posed by digital disruption and start-ups, Oracle (36%), BT (27%), HP, SAP (both 23%) and IBM (20%) were still the leading suppliers to CIO 100 organisations.

Vodafone saw an increase from 10% in 2014 to 19% this year, while Dell jumped from 7% to 12% since its private buy-back by founder Michael Dell last year.

CIO 100 judge Ian Cox reiterated some of the themes from his latest column; that despite the evolving market and the plethora of smaller suppliers scrapping for a piece of the action, many large organisations can be somewhat committed to their technology architecture.

“The fact that the traditional IT companies still dominate the vendor lists of most organisations is not totally surprising as companies have invested significant sums in their platforms over many years and the longstanding IT providers would have been key to building these platforms,” he said.

“However, much of the real, game-changing innovation and thinking is increasingly coming from smaller technology companies, particularly start-ups. CIOs need to be engaging with these other companies on a regular basis, learning from them and introducing them to the rest of the business to stimulate thinking and prompt new ideas. Hopefully we will see this shift in future submissions with more CIOs listing newer and/or smaller vendors alongside the more traditional IT suppliers.”

Tata Consultancy Services was named by 15% of CIOs, leading the outsourcers ahead of Capgemini (10%), Fujitsu (8%), CSC, Accenture (both 6%), Atos, Cognizant, Wipro and CGI (all 5%), Northgate (4%) Capita, Steria (both 3%), and Civica (2%).

Of the other cloud services, software, and technology suppliers, Salesforce.com (12%), Amazon (9%), Google (7%), VMware (5%), Workday, Adobe (both 4%), and Rackspace (2%) were joined by new entries from China Lenovo (5%) and Huawei (2%).

The Chinese company – which has had to dismiss allegations it has been involved in state-sponsored espionage on behalf of its native government – was named along with other networking and virtualisation providers Cisco (8%), EE, Virgin (both 7%), Verizon (4%), Talk Talk (3%), and Citrix (2%).