By Julie Bort
Network World, 12/24/01
[ Back to Company Powerometer 2001: Cisco loses face ]

In this phone survey, conducted for Network World by Research Concepts in Berlin, Mass., 250 readers ranked a vendor's and CEO's power on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 equaling most powerful (see story, page 46, for CEO rankings). Research Concepts then calculated the mean average, and we compared those averages against last year's. To chart historical performance, we use the same list of 25 vendors annually, until a vendor is acquired, goes out of business or is otherwise not an appropriate choice. We removed Cabletron this year because it split into four companies. This opened a slot for EMC, an editors' choice for our annual 10 most powerful companies in networking list for two years running.

We queried readers from more than a dozen industries, from aerospace to utilities. Readers from the manufacturing, government and finance sectors contributed most — but still less than half — of the total responses. All respondents worked for companies with more than 1,000 employees and almost 40% worked for global firms that employ more than 20,000 people.