Celebrating the Industry's Top Vendors

This week in Florida, VARBusiness named the winners of the 2003 Annual Report Card survey, one of the industry's most trusted assessments of partner satisfaction. Big winners -- as picked by you, their solution providers -- included IBM, Microsoft and HP. They and other companies were honored at the CMP XChange '03 conference held this week at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel.

IBM's Frank Vitagliano, vice president of distribution channels management for the IBM Personal Computing Division, was honored with the 2003 Lifetime Achievement award while Kevin Gilroy of Hewlett-Packard was named 2003 Channel Executive of the Year. Also singled out for special recognition: IBM's iSeries, which was recognized for having the highest Loyalty score in the entire study.

Many big-name vendors -- Cisco, Microsoft, HP, IBM -- took top honors in their respective product categories, but smaller companies were by no means shut out. In addition to the overall category, vendors were honored in three subcategories: Product Innovation, Support and Partnership.

In the Advanced Desktops and Workstations category, HP and Sun tied for Overall Category title. They also tied in Product Innovation, though HP won both the Support and Partnership subcategories outright.

In the Entry-Level Servers category, HP swept all subcategories, earning the Overall Category title, as did the IBM iSeries in Midrange Servers. Samsung swept all subcategories to win in Display Technology as did Western Digital in Desktop Disk Drives. Samsung's overall score was the highest in the entire survey.

In addition to these winners, Xerox, Cisco, AT&T, Tivoli and Microsoft won Overall Category ARC titles in Network Color Printers, Wireless LANs, Business Class IP & Data Services, Storage Management Software, Web Applications and Tools and Data Management Software (Microsoft won for the latter two).

In the Communications Networking Solutions category, a number of vendors were ranked highly by VARs, but Alcatel took the Overall Category title.

In Enterprise Operating Systems, Novell finished first for Product Innovation, Microsoft for Support, and Novell for Partnership. Despite Novell's impressive showing, Microsoft won the Overall Category.

The Security Management Software category was a fight to the finish. However, Symantec ultimately prevailed after tying for first in Product Innovation and Partnership, and winning outright in Support. The category of Enterprise Disk Drives, too, was a knockdown drag out between two venerable competitors: Seagate and Maxtor. Seagate won in Product Innovation, while Maxtor was voted best in Support and Partnership. In the end, Seagate and Maxtor tied for the Overall Category win.

Network Storage saw a number of vendors ranked highly by their solution providers. In the end, IBM went home with the Overall Category award, winning the Support subcategory and tying with Hitachi for tops in Partnering. In Mobile Computing, IBM won in the Product Innovation subcategory and went home with the overall title.

In the Desktop & Server Processors category, archrivals Intel and AMD battled it out with Intel leading in Product Innovation. The duo tied in Support and AMD took Partnership. Overall, Intel won the category.

For detailed results and anlysis, see our Oct. 13 issue.