In the technology industry, the little fish always wants to eat the big fish.
The two most preferred security vendors picked by CIOs in the survey were Symantec and Cisco.
But ironically, they were also two of the top five companies CIOs “refuse to work with.”
Things get worse when you look at the list of companies they “plan to work with” in the future. Symantec received zero votes, while Cisco got only 8% of responses. Meanwhile, two security upstarts, FireEye and Palo Alto Networks, were ranked at the top, accounting for over 40% of the responses.
The report didn’t explain why there’s such a huge discrepancy between the categories, only indicating, “the next generation vendors are chipping away at the stronghold legacy vendors still have on the security market.”
But it’s not hard to guess why this is happening. Once you reach the size of Cisco or Symantec, innovation tends to slow and customer service may get worse. Fast-growing companies like FireEye and Palo Alto Networks — although they’re both public now — have more flexibility to try new ways of solving age-old problems because they’re not wedded to legacy business. They’re also generally more accessible, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.