A Sense of Satisfaction

Well, you have probably read by now which vendors took top honors in this year's VARBusiness Annual Report Card. The results included a mix of the old standards, such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Cisco Systems, winning several well-deserved ARC trophies. More important, though, some newcomers broke through and captured high honors for both their products and their programs.

There were a number of rather surprising results in this year's study. The first was Network Appliance's strong win in the Network Storage category. Competing against such big guns as HP and EMC, the $2 billion company posted strong scores across the board. Now one could argue that NetApp benefited from beginner's luck, but I believe the vendor's victory was the result of a bunch of happy VARs recruited through the hard work of Leonard Iventosch, who served as the company's lone channel voice for many years.

Eric Loe, director of business development channel sales, says NetApp intends to expand its channel presence. The larger the partner community, the harder NetApp is going to have to work to maintain high satisfaction scores. Here's a company, though, that isn't the market leader. Rather, it represents a strong growth opportunity for partners. The high marks it received were clearly tied to the ability of a solution provider to grow its business with NetApp solutions.

There was another victory that was even sweeter than NetApp's, and that was Ricoh's. The printer vendor's channel strategy is guided by Ann Moser, who expected a strong showing but not an outright win over HP, Lexmark, Xerox and others. The scores were incredibly tight in Product Innovation and Support, but it was Ricoh's Partnership marks that separated it from the pack. The vendor's one area of weakness was Loyalty, where Ricoh needs to convince its relatively new partners to stick it out. But if anyone is up to the challenge, it's Moser, whose ARC win was long overdue.

There were a few other vendor performances worth noting. HP is on the right track. It edged out IBM for the first time in nearly a decade to win the Entry-Level Servers category and tie with IBM/Tivoli in Storage Management Software. In Mobile Computers, HP tied with Toshiba. While there's still some uncertainty around HP's Attach Plus program, the company is clearly making progress in the channel.

Toshiba's efforts to rebuild its channel program paid off this year. Nothing comes easy; it's taken the vendor two years to rebuild that program after general manager Mark Simons made the rather bold move to re-engage with partners and apologize for past sins.

What's unsettling, though, is what's happening with Microsoft. Despite investing millions of dollars in its partner program and rolling out an impressive channel plan at its recent partner conference, Microsoft put on a poor ARC showing. It did win the Business Software category, but it lost to Novell in Server Operating Systems and to IBM in two categories: Information Management Software and Infrastructure & Integration Software. Given the enormous product rollout Microsoft has planned, the software giant should be concerned about its satisfaction scores.

Few companies have the competitive edge of IBM. If it had won in every ARC category, its executives still would have found something to complain about. The company took home top honors in a total of four categories, including Advanced Desktops & Workstations and Storage Management Software. Based on Big Blue's performance and channel leadership, the CMP Channel Group (the operating division of VARBusiness and CRN) gave the 2006 Channel Executive of the Year Award to Donn Atkins, IBM's general manager of Global Business Partners.

And since nobody gets to the top without the support of his or her family, we surprised Atkins by bringing his wife and two daughters on stage to help him celebrate the honor. They hid backstage during dinner and left Atkins speechless when it came time for him to accept his award.

Let me know which is your favorite vendor and why.

P.S. I know I had promised the return of VARBusiness trivia, and it'll be back--I assure you. But you'll just have to hold out a bit longer.

Robert C. DeMarzo is vice president/publisher of VARBusiness and GovernmentVAR magazines.