A Roll At The DICE Awards

The DICE awards honored digital product vendors receiving the highest ratings from integrators serving the home and SOHO in a recent survey.

Seagate, Scotts Valley, Calif., captured the most prestigious award of the evening, winning the overall channel criteria award for the highest channel scores of any vendor. The storage vendor, which is finalizing its acquisition of Maxtor, also captured the top award for external storage.

ViewSonic, Walnut, Calif., a longtime channel savvy display vendor, walked away with the prestigious overall technical channel criteria award, scoring the highest technical ratings from digital integrators.

Belkin, Compton, Calif., which over the last several years has aggressively expanded its digital footprint, walked away with the most awards, capturing the top honor in three categories: wireless networking, wired networking and power protection.

Other winners included Panasonic for flat panel televisions; Epson for projectors; Symantec for backup storage software; NEC for desktop LCD monitors; Hewlett-Packard for Media PCs; AMX for home control platforms; Crestron for distributed audio and D-Link for premise security cameras.

Denzel Lane, president of integrator Digital Home PC, Wichita, Kan., said Seagate and ViewSonic are among his top vendors. "Seagate's product support is great," he said. "They offer great warranties and have outstanding channel support, helping us get their product integrated into solutions. As for ViewSonic, they also have tremendous support with a wide range of products that can be integrated into most any IT or digital home solution. They are first to market with a lot of technologies that fit right into what consumers are demanding."

Jennifer Bradfield, director of Americas Channel Marketing for Seagate, said the storage vendor was thrilled to walk away with the top channel honor. "We consider this quite an honor, especially coming from the system builder community where we have put in place tailored programs for them," she said.

Jeff Volpe, vice president of marketing, Americas, at ViewSonic, said the display vendor was "happy and humbled" by its overall technical award victory. He said the win is the result of an aggressive revamp of its product line last April. "We put that together based on reseller feedback," he said. "We don't just want to put together a good program for resellers; we try to maintain an innovative leadership position."

Jon Simonsen, director of sales for Belkin, said the vendor was surprised and excited by its triple crown victory. "We have been working at this for a couple of years. It's great to see our hard work and efforts are paying off. We have a great name, having been around selling cables for 20 years. We've worked hard to build awareness in other segments providing great products that we stand behind."

Capping off the evening, CMP also offered special recognition to Intel as manufacturer of the year and D&H Distributing as distributor of the year.

Dan Schwab, vice president of marketing for D&H, Harrisburg, Pa., said it is a great honor. "D&H has been ahead of the curve, trying to take this marketplace and really drive it to a burgeoning channel," he said. "We are starting to see the fruits of our labor. It's nice to have D&H acknowledged as a thought leader driving our vendors and partners to take advantage of this new opportunity."