Being A Champion
Channel Champions is a broad-based perception study in which solution providers rate vendors on their partner programs and the technical strength of their products. In order to improve upon the study, this year we made a number of alterations.
The project will now be published in March, and the vendors that won the Channel Champions awards received their trophies at a ceremony in New Orleans last Thursday. We will continue to honor these vendors at a future awards reception.
We also changed the categories based on the evolving market and emerging opportunities. For the first time, we included wireless LANs, SANs, NAS, intrusion detection and antivirus software.
We also spent long hours on the channel and technical criteria, specifically targeted for each product category.
Since proving ROI is still on the tips of everyone's tongues, we decided to ask solution providers what their ROI was for investing in a particular vendor's products. We also separated the marketing and sales support criteria of 2001 and changed them to field sales support and marketing support.
As with the Olympics, there were some hometown favorites, some come-from-behind finishes, and a few surprises.
The first surprise was in operating systems, for which eight vendors were cited,the most vendors of all the categories. The race was extremely close, but for the first time a Linux vendor, Red Hat, won. This shows solution providers' willingness to embrace Linux as an alternate operating system.
Databases was also a tight race. Microsoft and Oracle tied for first place based on their technical scores. But IBM won in the channel criteria, indicating that the market is still very much up for grabs among solution providers.
Newcomer EMC took the top spot in NAS, and IBM came from behind and took the honors in notebooks. ViewSonic and APC won yet again in monitors and UPSes, respectively.
We hope you use the results as a gauge of overall channel satisfaction and to help plan and grow your business.
If you have suggestions for Channel Champions, contact me at (781) 839-1272 or [email protected].