Marshall Breeding has published the results of the "Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation" and I doubt they'll make comfortable reading at SirsiDynix HQ (unless Scribe has got it right!)…
The products of SirsiDynix, Unicorn and Horizon, received low satisfaction scores from libraries responding to the survey. Unicorn, the company’s flagship ILS performed somewhat better than Horizon. 14% of libraries running Unicorn and about half of those with Horizon indicate interest in migrating to another system — not surprising considering SirsiDynix's position not to develop that system into the future. Horizon libraries scored high interest in open source ILS alternatives. The comments provided by libraries running Horizon voiced an extremely high level of frustration with SirsiDynix as a company and its decision to discontinue Horizon. Many indicated distrust toward the company. The comments from libraries running Unicorn, the system which SirsiDynix selected as the basis for its flagship Symphony ILS, also ran strongly negative — some because of issues with the software some because of concerns with the company.
Voyager, Horizon, and Aleph 500 sites are the most likely to consider moving to Open Source (such as Koha or Evergreen).
If Open Source isn't of interest, then the satisfaction levels amongst Polaris customers makes that a very attractive system to move to.
Very interesting survey!
[...] Dave Pattern rightly quotes the paragraph about SirsiDynix. They suffer badly because Horizon customers feel very let-down about the switch to Symphony (similar to Voyager above). Even the Unicorn customers don't seem to have much trust in the company. Dave highlights Scribe's suggestion that maybe SD are happy to lose a substantial part of their customer base simply because they don't have the level of staffing required to migrate and support them. This might be supported by the UK position: the SD UK office aren't keen to let Horizon customers move to Horizon 7.4/ HIP 3.09 which are being offered in the US, and we've wondered whether this is because they simply don't have the remaining Horizon expertise to support this. The SD argument is that they don't want to spend staffing resource on a legacy system, but as many of us will be on that legacy system for some years we'd rather our money went on something we would use rather than a system we're not yet committed to migrating to. SD's acceptable customer loss level was talked about amongst the delegates at CODI. [...]