Aberdeen Ranks the Top 100 Tech Companies

Published: May 22, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The consultants at Aberdeen Group, now a division of market researcher and mail list builder Harte-Hanks, have just finished up a massive research project to put together the Annual State of the Market Report for the information technology sector. As part of the report, Aberdeen's experts have used customer input to create a ranking of the top 100 most influential technology companies.

The 2008 edition of the report, which costs a whopping $1,995 for 161 pages of arts and charts and analysis, is available at this link, if you happen to have some extra budget money lying around. The data in the report, according to Aberdeen, is based on data from over 550,000 companies surveyed over 2.5 million times, supplemented by over 35,000 senior-level interviews. (Harte-Hanks also owns Computer Intelligence, which used to have a brilliant relational database of information for data centers in the United States, Canada, and Europe and which I used to have unlimited access to when dinosaurs were hanging around smoking cigarettes on street corners and bad-mouthing mammals.) It took Aberdeen five years to put this data together, apparently. Exactly what is in this report is unclear. The company did not say.

It did, however, provide the top 100 tech company listing as a teaser to get people interested:

1. Microsoft          35. i2                    69. Xerox
2. Oracle             36. EDS                   70. Front Range
3. SAP                37. QAD                   71. Internec
4. IBM                38. Ariba                 72. Manugistics
5. Cisco              39. CA                    73. Palm
6. Hewlett Packard    40. Epicor                74. Unisys
7. Dell               41. Juniper               75. Yahoo!
8. Salesforce.com     42. Sprint/Nextel         76. 3com
9. EMC                43. Tata Consulting       77. ABB
10. Sun Microsystems  44. ADP                   78. CANON
11. Google            45. Fujitsu               79. Capgemini
12. RIM (Blackberry)  46. Intuit                80. Informatica
13. Siemens           47. Manhattan Associates  81. Interwoven
14. Adobe             48. Novell                82. McKesson
15. AT&T              49. Red Prairie           83. Mincom
16. Apple             50. SunGard               84. Mitel
17. Sage              51. Telstra               85. Netsuite
18. Infor             52. BMC                   86. Omniture
19. Nortel            53. BT                    87. Progress
20. Avaya             54. CSC                   88. Rackspace
21. Red Hat           55. Skype                 89. SPSS
22. Motorola          56. Infosys               90. Syntel
23. Verizon Wireless  57. NetApp                91. Teradata
24. Dassault          58. Symantec              92. T-Mobile
25. Accenture         59. Huawei                93. Toshiba
26. Sony Ericsson     60. IFS                   94. Websense
27. Alcatel - Lucent  61. Microstrategy         95. Servigistics
28. AutoDesk          62. Aruba                 96. Genesys
29. Intel             63. CDW                   97. Logility
30. SAS               64. Concur                98. Kronos
31. Citrix            65. Exact                 99. Rockwell Automation
32. Nokia             66. Hitachi              100. Checkpoint Systems
33. PTC               67. Qlikview
34. Lawson            68. Vonage

It is incredibly difficult to make a ranking of tech companies--in this case meaning telecom and services as well as information technology suppliers and Web 2.0 firms as well--so this is inherently interesting. I think it would be equally interesting to throw the company logos out and rank the top 100 influential technologies in use by corporations. If I get bored some day, I might start that and ask you all for some help.