Like the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, Sprint is racking up the titles year after year in the Nemertes Research Pilothouse Award for MPLS Services competition. We may not be able to claim our own Michael Jordan, but we can attribute our success to our skill at three-pointers (in this case, the three points being customer service, technology, and value).

For 2012, Nemertes named us the Top Provider among Market Challengers, thanks to superior scores in the customer service and value categories. This is the fourth year for this award, which is based solely on the judgment of some 1,500 IT decision makers surveyed by Nemertes, and Sprint has now taken the top honor for MPLS services for three of those years.

As Henry Svenblad, principal research analyst at Nemertes framed it, “Nemertes views MPLS services as a key component to managing constrained bandwidth and ensuring performance for critical business applications. Business users of MPLS services rated Sprint a 4.13 out of 5 for customer service, and 4.09 out of 5 for technology, praising the company’s overall customer service."

You can read the news announcement here, but it's the more detailed information in the accompanying report that really tells the tale.

Explaining why Sprint won, Nemertes noted that we edged out the other Market Challengers "with a nicely clustered set of ratings, led by top ratings in the area of customer service and strong value scores compared to its competition." They go on to explain:

Overall, the company offers a solid MPLS service that is appreciated by its customers. “Sprint is outstanding from all aspects: great account team, very responsive. They take care of us,” says the CIO of a large manufacturing company. Sprint ... tends to stay consistent. In fact, its overall rating last year (4.09 on a scale of 1 to 5) was identical to this year’s.

... Sprint’s highest rating is in customer service ... (It) has been Sprint’s highest score since 2010. For this reason, we anticipate that Sprint will continue its strong streak in customer service. Sprint’s 4.09 Technology score is solid, coming in higher than value, but lower than customer service. It is right in line with the average technology scores of all vendors, higher than its fellow Market Challengers.

The company’s network architecture is widely perceived to be solid and dependable. “It just plain works,” says an IT manager at a midsize energy company. At 4.04, Sprint’s value score ties for the highest value score in this category among all vendors, Challengers and Leaders alike.

This award is particularly heartening to us because MPLS is the foundation for Sprint’s expanding portfolio of cloud-based solutions, among them Sprint Complete Collaboration, which launched earlier this year, and our recently announced Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, which we plan to launch late this year. Available to both business and wholesale partners, our all-IP network continues to grow and is available in 165 countries today.

Calling the award "continued validation" that Sprint is meeting and exceeding customer expectations, Mike Fitz, vice president of wireline noted that we emphasize this for a basic reason, because "Our customers depend upon our innovative wireless and all-IP wireline network to deliver the security, reliability and performance demanded by business-critical, real-time applications."