2006 Channel Champions Survey Methodology
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While the categories, vendors and ratings criteria have changed over this project's 16-year history, the basic methodology behind the Channel Champions survey has stood the test of time to become the largest and most comprehensive survey of its kind in the industry.
In our annual CRN Channel Champions survey, we ask solution providers to rate their satisfaction with vendors in particular product categories. In the 2006 survey, solution providers rated more than 100 vendors in 26 categories.
Nearly 1,400 solution providers responded to the survey, conducted between October and December 2005. Solution providers doing the ratings were selected at random from CRN's subscriber list, and were carefully screened. Before being allowed to rate a vendor, solution providers needed to affirm that they worked with the products in question and had a significant business relationship with the vendor.
Most respondents were qualified to rate more than one vendor, and CRN received more than 9,100 individual ratings across all the criteria in all the categories.
Solution providers rated vendors on 12 to 14 criteria, depending on the category. The vendor with the highest overall average rating in each category was named the Channel Champion.
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We also divided the criteria into two groups: technical criteria and channel program criteria. CRN recognized vendors with the highest average technical ratings and highest average channel program ratings in each category.
The scores were weighted. To determine the weighting factor, solution providers were asked to rate the importance of each criterion on a scale of 1 to 7, and the results were normalized to a scale where 1 was deemed to be "average" importance. The raw rating scores for each vendor were then multiplied by the weighting factor, which yielded higher scores on criteria that solution providers deemed more important.
Solution provider ratings were based on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 meaning "very dissatisfied" and 7 meaning "very satisfied." Those raw ratings, as indicated above, were then weighted and converted to a scale of 1 to 100.
The vendors for each category were chosen based on market share data and a pretest conducted by CRN to determine which vendors solution providers were most frequently working with in each category.