Advanced Desktops & Workstations Category Profile

Combining channel services and support with a consolidated portfolio of offerings is the recipe that drove partner satisfaction in the 2006 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) survey category of Advanced Desktops & Workstations. For the fourth time in six years, IBM earned Company of the Year, proving that its exit from the PC business needn't impact channel excellence.

While Hewlett-Packard, which ranked second in this category for the second year in a row, managed to edge ahead of IBM in Loyalty (80 to IBM's 79), Big Blue earned the highest scores in Product Innovation (73 to HP's 71), Support (68 to 65) and Partnership (63 to 60). Lenovo, which tied with Gateway for third place, earned lower-than-average scores in all four areas--perhaps a reflection of the growing pains associated with driving its own partner program around the ThinkCentre and ThinkPad lines.

When results of the 2005 ARC were released, the ink was still wet on Lenovo's contract to purchase the PC piece of IBM's business for $1.75 billion, and though Lenovo earned the top spot in this category, its brand name was tied intimately to IBM's. Now Lenovo is flying solo.

"IBM has worked hard to focus on the systems side of the business. Leveraging that portfolio has been a full-time job," says Alex Yost, director of product management for System x at IBM. "There's an interesting trend in the industry [toward] an increase in complexity. For partners, it's not just about fulfillment; it's about capitalizing on innovation." In that area, IBM earned the highest scores across the board, from product quality/reliability (76) to compatibility & ease of integration (73).

The challenge is different for the more commoditized hardware, such as PCs and laptops. In those cases, partners want vendors to provide subtle differentiators.

Christian Converse, operations manager at Clarksburg, Md.-based VAR Daly Computers, says vendors can use bells and whistles to set their products apart--biometrics, perhaps, or things as simple as longer battery life or more memory.

More influential to VAR satisfaction than Product Innovation is Partnership. Solution providers place a lot of emphasis on communication, revenue/profit potential, channel conflict and ease of doing business.

"It's all about form, function and fit," says Mike Law, managing consultant of servers and storage at Greenbelt, Md.-based Presidio. He's noticed a conscious effort by IBM in the past year to consolidate the number of solutions available, while increasing flexibility in terms of configuring to order.

The vendor's new Open Graphics program, for example, allows partners to pick and choose components according to customer requirements--not unlike the Dell approach to selling systems. "Why produce a family no one wants?" Law asks. "Make them all feature-rich and it becomes a no-brainer."

Naturally, coupled with quality programs and business tools is Support. Both IBM and HP exceeded the average scores in presales support (64 average) and postsales support (66 average), with IBM earning a 68 in the former and a 69 in the latter. HP scored 65 in presales support and 67 in postsales support. Both vendors outdid the average in quality of technical and marketing support as well.

And even Lenovo is making efforts to turn things around in this area. "Lenovo availability has been [strong]," Converse says. "We have a very aggressive field rep this year who wants to be in our face. Vendors need to increase access to their more knowledgeable people with their higher-end products."