Notebooks

Champ: Toshiba

By Craig Zarley, ChannelWeb

3:00 PM EDT Fri. Apr. 14, 2006
From the April 17, 2006 issue of CRN

Toshiba America Information Systems, based largely on the strength of its technology, walked away with the 2006 Channel Champions award for notebooks, edging past rival Hewlett-Packard in this highly competitive category.

The Irvine, Calif.-based vendor finished first or tied for first on seven of the eight technical criteria. Partners particularly liked the features of Toshiba's Tecra and Satellite notebooks, giving the company a 2.8-point edge in that area.

That margin was enough to give Toshiba's overall Channel Champions satisfaction rating of 74.2 a slight half-point lead over HP's 73.7. Next in line were Lenovo with 72.4, Sony with 69.4 and Acer with 67.6.

"Toshiba is the leader in notebook design and features," said Dan Hogan, vice president at DSR, an Elkridge, Md.-based solution provider. He added that Toshiba excels in service reliability by making parts readily available to partners.

The competition was stiffer in channel program satisfaction, where it tied with HP. "There has never been a question about the quality of the product or the amount of money Toshiba puts into research and development," said John Marks, CEO of JDM Infrastructure, a solution provider in Chicago. "It's all about channel conflict and lack of channel focus."

Toshiba did win two channel program areas, coming up high in total ROI for customers and responsiveness to solution provider feedback on channel programs. But it also finished third behind HP and Lenovo in vendor support and second behind HP in technical education.

Still, Toshiba's tie with HP in overall channel program satisfaction may be indicative of things to come. Toshiba revamped its Preferred Partner Program on April 1, and its new channel chief, Jerry Lumpkin, vice president of Toshiba's Business Channel Sales, vowed to eliminate channel conflict.

Marks, who met with Lumpkin in late March, said Toshiba was gearing up for a new channel push and that Lumpkin promised Toshiba would not take direct any deal in which a channel partner was involved.

"It sounds as if Lumpkin has a plan to make Toshiba very channel-friendly," Marks said.

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