Inside This Year’s ARC: Who’s Back, Who’s New, Who’s Gone

Someone recently asked me if any significant trends emerge from the VARBusiness Annual Report Card. Of course, my first reaction was to spout off a litany of trends, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the most important trend is that the results are completely unpredictable.

The reason is simple. Sure, the ARC is the ultimate measurement of satisfaction among solution providers when it comes to their technology suppliers. But the entire landscape changes every year due to the speed at which the market changes. By contrast, unless Daimler-Chrysler or Ford makes a sweeping model change, you can probably pinpoint customer-satisfaction trends to the fourth decimal place for a particular automobile. The road we drive those cars on never changes, yet the streets solution providers traverse change daily.

Looking back at the ARC's 15-year history, it's impossible to find a vendor that dominates a single category or remains a solution-provider favorite year after year. Opinions ebb and flow, based on each vendor's perceived performance. For instance, Hewlett-Packard was hotter than a pistol in last year's ARC survey. But despite Carly Fiorina's arrival as CEO in July 1999, the company slipped in three of the five categories it competed in this year.

Rundown of Results

Some observations about this year's ARC follow:

Dell Computer is the runaway favorite when it comes to commodity technology. It received the highest scores in the new clients (desktops and notebooks) category. In an era of ordering via the Internet, Dell received high grades for ease of doing business. Its loyalty rating was even higher than NEC's. Despite its win in clients, however, Dell scored poorly in the entry-level server category. Obviously, the king of indirect has to work a bit harder at winning over potential partners.

IBM's performance in this year's ARC helped earn it a Lifetime Achievement Award. The company participated in more than a half-dozen categories, winning two outright and tying with Allaire for a third. But IBM is a company of extremes, and no matter how hard IBM's PartnerWorld group performs, the vendor is hostage to the execution of all IBM product groups. So, while IBM scored well overall for partnership, it received pitifully low scores for product availability for its clients.

We've seen a wonderful celebration of e-business software vendors during the past 18 months. But there has been little in the way of hard-core research to gauge their true performance in terms of the quality of their products, support or partnership. Well, presented in this issue is an analysis of those companies, including BEA, BroadVision, CommerceOne and Vignette. The news, for the most part, is mixed because many of the programs designed to support solution providers are barely a year old. But most companies in the Internet software category have a great deal of work cut out for them in terms of supporting partners. When it comes to loyalty, for example, solution providers gave Oracle the second-lowest rating in the Internet software space.

This year's ARC also measures the effectiveness of e-business itself. We asked solution providers to rate their vendor partners' e-business programs to determine whether they were streamlining the supply-chain process and flow of technical information. Not surprisingly, Cisco earned the highest score for its e-business program,proof that the company practices what it preaches. Toshiba's e-business program got hammered. IBM, the company that defined e-business, should divert some of its e-business marketing budget to shoring up its programs. In client systems, entry-level and midrange servers, its scores were as disappointing as the Atlanta Braves' in the play-offs.

If you're searching for a case study in partnership, look no further than ViewSonic. This four-time ARC winner earned high marks for its products and support programs and remains one of the easiest companies to do business with.

Who are your favorite vendors? Let me know at rdemarzo@cmp.com.