James Turner, security and services analyst with Frost & Sullivan, said the most fascinating aspect about the survey result is that IT managers want reliability and responsive technical support over and above price.

"It is more important to an IT manager to buy a reliable product with good technical support than it is to buy from a vendor with a good reputation," Turner said.

"IT managers consider it more important to buy a good product at a cheap price than to buy from a company with an amazingly wide product range, throws in half their tools for free."

Respondents were also asked to rate their favorite products. Interestingly, IT managers ranked the free antispyware tool Spybot as the top product even compared to purchased software.

Respondents rated Cisco best in terms of reliability of services and product while Trend Micro won for a high level of responsiveness for technical support, timeliness of patches, updates and price. IBM was nominated for the reporting capabilities of products.