Hewlett-Packard suffers as customers expect more

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has been criticised in a corporate customer survey for not supplying enough storage with its servers.

The Corporate IT Buying Behaviour and Customer Satisfaction survey also highlighted customer dissatisfaction with costly and difficult upgrades from the IT giant.

The survey, conducted by Technology Business Research, questioned 300 IT managers at Fortune 1000 companies about notebooks, PCs and servers. Julie Perron, manager of primary research at Technology Business Research, described HP's customers as "demanding" and explained that HP would have difficulty meeting the high level of expectation customers have of the company.

But she admitted: "The base disk capacity in their server range is not up to par."

Jamie Snowdon, analyst at Input, agreed with Perron that customers expect a lot from HP. "The expectation of a customer who bought from Dell wouldn't be as high as if they had bought from HP," he said.

Rivals Dell and IBM fared better in the survey. Dell gained 2 per cent in the annual supplier satisfaction ratings, with IBM climbing 4 per cent.