Column: Rewarding Public-Channel Excellence

Selling isn't easy, period. Selling IT to the public sector--federal, state and local governments, as well as education and health care--is vastly different from its commercial counterpart. Solution providers and integrators face myriad challenges: long sales cycles, strict specifications, legislative budget wranglings, open-bid processes and steep competition from direct-sales vendors. Perhaps no other channel segment requires as much vendor support.

Rather than simply publishing our annual guide to government channel programs, GovernmentVAR sought to provide you with a higher level of guidance, rewarding those exemplary public-sector programs and channel efforts with our first "five-star" ratings.

GovernmentVAR scoured the public-sector channel for the best programs, measuring their quality based on key characteristics. Does the vendor have a dedicated channel program? Are partners monitored for compliance with training and certification requirements? Does the vendor communicate program and product changes to its partners, and is there a discernible executive commitment to the channel? Of course, we also looked at total public-sector channel revenue from products and services sales, as well as vendor investment in the channel.

Empirical data goes only so far. We also applied some subjective analyses of the intangibles that make channel programs good. This is particularly important when assessing vendors that do a great deal of business in the public- sector channel but don't have a separate channel program.

The result is the first class of 25 five-star public-sector channel programs. Among the honorees are Panasonic, which sells its rugged Toughbooks to law enforcement, the military and first-responders; ViewSonic and Samsung, which provide numerous government agencies with display products; Juniper Networks and Check Point Software Technologies, which secure many institutions; and Oki Data, which sells printers to all levels of the public sector. The five-star vendors epitomize what it means to show commitment to the public-sector channel by driving sales, managing conflict and collaborating to grow partner business and revenue.

This is no beauty contest. The missing vendors--Acer, Apple, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, 3Com and Xerox, among them--are conspicuously absent. Many of the well-known vendors fell just short of the five-star mark. Others didn't come close to making the cut.

The GovernmentVAR five-star programs are setting the benchmark for excellence. We hope public-sector vendors will revel in this honor--they've earned it, after all.

Lawrence M. Walsh, Editor, [email protected]