New Survey Reveals Microsoft, IBM, and Hummingbird Command Top Mind Share in Enterprise Information Portal Market

Business Wire, May 9, 2000

Business Editors

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 9, 2000

IT decision makers in private industry, government, and education

identify top three vendors whose EIP products they are aware of

Preliminary results from a new syndicated survey of over one thousand IT decision makers now being executed by Survey.com, the leading eResearch services company, reveals that among respondents considering, evaluating, or deploying an enterprise information portal (EIP), products from Microsoft, IBM, and Hummingbird command the top mind share (in that order). Respondents were asked which EIP vendors they were aware of, specifically for their EIP products. The top 10 vendors, in order, were:

      1.   Microsoft         6.   Brio

      2.   IBM               7.   Netscape

      3.   Hummingbird       8.   J.D. Edwards

      4.   SAP               9.   Sybase

      5.   PeopleSoft       10. BroadVision

Among many other aspects of the EIP market, the survey also probed respondent opinions about the nature of an enterprise information portal. Overwhelmingly, they chose to describe an EIP as a system that "acts as a single point of access to internal and external information." The survey results also show that the dominant use of an EIP will likely be to deliver structured information (database, data warehouse, etc.) to users.

"What's interesting about these mind share figures is that they do not correspond to the "buzz" among traditional analysts and the trade press," said Dave Trowbridge, senior analyst at Survey.com. "In fact, some of the vendors who are making the biggest splash with advertising, PR coverage, and analyst reports in the EIP market ended up well down the ladder when it comes to actual customer awareness. This just demonstrates, once again, that marketing hype is no substitute for a technically solid product."

Detailed results from the new survey are available to the press on request; a chart of the mind share results is online at www.survey.com/datapoint_eip.html

Survey.com

Survey.com is the leading provider of eResearch and is the first company to successfully harness the power of the Internet for conducting primary and secondary market research. The company has completed more than one million Internet-based surveys for both proprietary and syndicated market research studies on a broad range of topics, including information technology, consumer electronics, and entertainment. The firm's clients include IBM, Canon Computer Systems, CareerPath, Cisco Systems, CMP Media, EarthLink Network, InformationWeek, Microsoft, Motorola, PC World, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch, and 3Com.