From the 'everybody loves popularity contests' file:

Research firm The InfoPro has an interesting study out on who enterprise IT buyers consider to be the most exciting networking vendor.

The winner?  Cisco by a wide margin.

The study involved over 130 one-on-one hour-long interviews with Fortune 1000 companies. Over 50 percent of whom ranked Cisco as the most exciting vendor.

Though Cisco was the dominant choice, the study showed that Cisco should be looking over its shoulder at Juniper Networks who came in second at almost 20 percent. According to the InfoPro, Juniper saw the largest jump in the percentage of organizations considering it an Exciting Vendor, nearly doubling from 10 percent in the previous study which was published in the summer of 2007.

Application acceleration vendor Riverbed placed third at just over 10 percent, while HP and Foundry round out the top five.

"Though Cisco still leads the pack, Networking pros feel that innovation in the Networking market seems to have temporarily halted. This is having an effect on where they are looking to obtain the Networking solutions they need," said Bill Trussell, Managing Director of Networking research for TheInfoPro  in a statement.