8/22/2005 -- Customers think Cisco Systems Inc. is top in the enterprise router space in almost every category -- except pricing and value, where the networking giant trails most of its rivals.

That’s the conclusion of a new survey (“User Plans for Routers, North America 2005”) from market watcher Infonetics Research, which found that Cisco effectively routed its competitors in all categories except the aforementioned two, where the networking giant trailed 3Com, ADTRAN, Juniper and Nortel.

The Infonetics survey is based on interviews with 180 medium and large organizations from six different verticals. The survey was designed to determine how prospects select and evaluate vendors, as well as assess customers’ perceptions of leading enterprise router manufacturers and products. It’s a scorecard-based survey, with the six entrants (3Com, ADTRAN, Cisco, Enterasys, Juniper and Nortel) assessed in terms of overall satisfaction, pricing, value, security, technology, management features, product roadmap, financial stability, and service and support.

When all the scorecards were tallied, Cisco was far and away the winner in all of the categories except for pricing and value. Nortel was a distant runner-up.

"Cisco continues to top respondents' short list of vendors for future router purchases, but the surprise this year is that Juniper shoots up to second, which is impressive considering they've only recently entered the market," said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst at Infonetics Research, in a statement. "Cisco's vulnerability in the pricing category increased this year, with all vendors but one outscoring them, and with Juniper outscoring them on value. Still, Cisco continues to get the highest satisfaction marks overall -- almost double the votes than competitors. And more importantly, companies are not all that likely to change router vendors; in fact, they'll avoid it if at all possible."

Customers said their top three criteria for selecting routers were adherence to standards, management features and high availability.

Elsewhere, customers said VoIP support is increasingly becoming a critical router feature, and integrated security features (e.g., firewall, VPN, IDS) is fast emerging as a top technology trend. -Stephen Swoyer