I have worked in the network, security, data center and cloud infrastructure industry for many years. I spend much of my time speaking to consumers of infrastructure technology from service providers to enterprises and I analyze more than 10 years of engagement data collected on SDxCentral. One of the most common questions I’m asked is, “Which technology vendors are the least and most risky for me to pick?”

People ask this question typically when they either have concerns about their current suppliers or when they are considering a new supplier because current ones can’t meet a new need. This question comes from decision-makers across industries and includes massive service providers, large enterprises and government agencies.

The answer is subjective and varies by company and situation. At the most basic level, what people want to know is, “can I trust this vendor to meet my needs over the life of my investment with them?” Making a technology decision for a specific vendor is often a three-to-12-year commitment. Anyone making a technology decision today needs to know that the vendor they select is likely to meet their needs for the lifetime of that investment. More bluntly, why would you bet your organization’s competitiveness or your career on a vendor that’s not in-tune with the market?

Rather than relying solely on a subjective analysis, we leveraged our data to make answering the question more quantitative.

How do you know if a vendor is in tune with the market?

Currently, many technology professionals rely on talking to the analyst community and meeting with executives from vendors to assess the market. While this approach surfaces good information, it provides a lopsided view. Most of these conversations will parrot a vendor’s story or share antidotes of what an analyst has learned from speaking with other customers. In other words, it’s part of the qualitative piece to the equation.

So, how do you find the quantitative elements you need to answer the question? Where do you find data that you can trust to show if a vendor practices what it preaches? And are they and their roadmap really in tune with the needs of their customers? How engaged are their executives with the market?

We decided to use our own data to answer two questions about a representative list of the largest and fastest-growing technology companies to gauge how in touch they are with the market:

• Which executive teams are engaging with SDxCentral content?
• Which marketing teams are engaging with SDxCentral content?

We measure this by analyzing the following information:

• The number of executives and marketers at a given company who have an SDxCentral account relative to their importance to the market
• The amount of content consumed by those executives and marketing teams on SDxCentral

This allows us to glean which companies and executives are engaged in the community and information sources those customers are using to make decisions. Similarly, by measuring consumption by marketing teams, we can see how in tune with the people responsible for product-market-fit with market trends. From here we rank vendors based on most in-tune (or out-of-tune) with their customers and market.

In other words, we use our data to see which vendors were pushing their story onto the market versus which listen to the market and adapt their products and story accordingly.

Methodology and assumptions

For this analysis to be relevant you need to be comfortable with these assumptions:

• That SDxCentral’s base of 185,000 member accounts with approximately 70% of those accounts comprising leaders, experts, and operators (LEOs) central to technology decision-making at organizations with over 1,000 people is representative of decision-makers at the largest service providers and enterprises is a relevant sample of technology buyers.
• That our content and three million actions in Q1 2024 consuming that content are representative of the priorities at large service providers and enterprises.
• That executive and marketing team engagement on SDxCentral is a reasonable proxy for how engaged the strategic and product leadership is with the overall market. One way to think about this is to look at this question: How engaged are the leaders and marketers with the watering hole where their customers gather?.
• Member accounts of people working at vendors account for less than 15% of total accounts, which means the vast majority of our members work at service providers or enterprises.

We hypothesize this is a reasonable proxy because executives and marketers who are not engaged with their customers are likely to be out of touch and as such make long-term technology or product investments by these companies a potentially risky investment.

Conversely, when we see an engaged marketing team but a disengaged executive team, this can show a lack of alignment between the executive priorities and marketing/product priorities, which also makes that vendor a more risky bet than the supplier whose executive and marketing teams are both connected to the market.

You can also see that suppliers in-tune with the market company-wide tend to be more stable, further making them a smart bet.

Findings

Our three most popular topics on SDxCentral are networking, security and cloud with AI interwoven across these topics. Let’s look at each of these markets.

Networking and security

Of the major networking companies, the most engaged executive teams work at Arista and Nokia. They also have the most engaged marketing, sales and technical teams. At these companies, it starts at the top and propagates down.

These leaders are followed by companies such as Ciena, Checkpoint Ericcson, Fortinet, Intel and Palo Alto Networks whose technical and marketing teams are highly engaged, though executives not so much. The companies with the least executive and marketing engagements: Cisco, Crowdstrike, Dell, HPE/Aruba and Juniper. However, all of these companies have healthy participation on SDxCentral from architects and engineers.

Looking at emerging networking companies (including secure access service edge (SASE) vendors) the most engaged executive and market teams are Aryaka, Cato and Versa. The companies with the least: Cloudflare and Netskope.

Cloud 

The most engaged cloud vendor from an executive perspective on SDxCentral is Microsoft Azure – and it’s not even close. The same could be said for AWS from a marketing perspective.

Surprisingly, Google is mostly MIA from an executive and marketing perspective. However, Google has the most network and security engineers and architects of the three consuming SDxCentral content

Beyond the big three, most other major vendors – Oracle, IBM, VMware/Broadcom, Red Hat – mostly engage with SDxCentral architect and engineering and marketing titles.

Takeaways

As I wrote about in December 2023, the articles that are most read by LEOs at large enterprises and service providers are those written about companies whose executive teams are also in the top tier of vendors with member accounts. The results prove this. What does it mean?

Vendors that are taking market share and that are on the upswing are highly engaged across the executive, technical and marketing teams. This signals a company that is well-aligned internally and executing in tune with customer needs.

Vendors with engaged technical and marketing teams are trying their best, though it can signal that the top executives are out of touch with the market.

Vendors with engaged technical and sales teams, but whose executives and marketing are mostly MIA, demonstrate that the people in the trenches know what needs to be done. However, are not getting the executive support or marketing aircover is an indication that the vendor may be a risky bet depending on your situation

Generally, our data maps to companies that are growing, taking share and have strong stock prices (or valuations), have the most-engaged executive and marketing teams. Our data also shows that the companies struggling the most are those disengaged with their target audience. SDxCentral is a single data point and does not represent the entire market, however, we do provide a reasonable projection to how in-tune a vendor is with its customers.

Recommendations

• Technology buyers: Ensure that you can trust the vendors you are considering to be engaged with the industry and learn from that engagement versus dictating their vision and products and services to you.
• Technology vendors: Encourage your team to stay engaged with your target audience and that they consume the same information as your customers and prospects. Executives, make sure that in addition to speaking with customers and the press you are also listening to them and consuming relevant information (because your customers and prospects are). Marketers, remember your job is to be with customers and where they hang out so you can adapt to their needs.
•  Investors: Take this as another data point when placing your bets in companies and their executive teams. Companies that are out of tune with their customers may be risky investments.