Vendors Recognized At Awards Dinner

The atmosphere was electric as CRN's editorial team recognized vendors garnering the highest levels of channel satisfaction during its inaugural Channel Champions awards ceremony.

The dinner was held here earlier this month at Solution Provider Xchange, a conference organized by CMP Media, which also publishes CRN. The Channel Champions report is the newspaper's longest-standing research project and has been conducted for the past 11 years, although this was the first time that vendors were formally recognized face to face.

During the annual survey, randomly selected solution providers are asked to rate specific vendors on a variety of technical and channel criteria. Those that earn the highest combined score are dubbed the champion for their category. More than 7,500 interviews were conducted during the research.

Overall awards were presented in more than 20 categories, with Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard claiming three victories each, and Symantec walking away with two trophies related to security products. Sub-category winners were also recognized, when they were different from the overall champions.

One of the evening's most controversial awards went to Red Hat, which won the operating systems category by the slimmest of margins, besting Microsoft and Novell. Red Hat is the first Linux vendor to be recognized in the annual research.

Another surprise result came in the database arena, where Oracle and Microsoft were both pronounced winners in a dead heat. This is one of several ties that have occurred throughout the history of the research project.

Relative channel newcomer EMC proved it has come a long way with solution providers in the past year by claiming victory among enterprise network attached storage vendors.

IBM Vice President Mark Hanny provided a moment of levity when he sent statuesque all-star basketball legend Moses Malone onstage to accept his trophy for application servers. Malone, who played for the Philadelphia 76ers, among other NBA teams, is part of an IBM promotional campaign featuring the WebSphere server software line.

For the complete indepth results of the research, refer to last week's edition of CRN, or visit the CRN Web site.

Next year's Channel Champions research report will be published in the spring. Editorial decisions regarding the product categories and vendors to be considered will be made later this year.