Users unhappy at high Cisco router prices

Cisco Systems continues to dominate the US enterprise router market, but prospective purchasers are becoming increasingly unhappy with the relatively high prices of the networking giant’s kit, research published today has claimed.

According to the Infonetics Research study, Cisco wins in all categories except pricing and value, for which users rate 3Com, ADTRAN, Juniper, and Nortel more highly.

Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst at Infonetics Research said: "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 the company has only recently entered the market.

"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."

The study, User Plans for Routers, North America 2005, is based on interviews with 180 medium and large organisations from six vertical markets including education, federal government, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail.

The main three criteria for selecting routers were found to be adherence to standards, management features and high availability. However, the study also revealed that VoIP support is quickly becoming a critical router feature.

The top emerging technology trend was identified as integration of security features like firewall, VPN, and IDS into routers.