What's The Score?

By Edward F. Moltzen

When it comes to notebooks, Toshiba America Inc. can often be thought of as producing "The Cal Ripken, Jr." of notebooks. In other words, the company, based in New York, has developed a reputation of building reliable, steady, stable mobile PCs that get the job done.

For those reasons, Toshiba is the 2008 VARBusiness Annual Report Card Company of the Year for Notebooks and Mobile Computers with an overall score of 67. This category was especially competitive this year, too, with the segment up for grabs following a year that saw significant consolidation, newer and smaller form factors hitting the market, and a potential minefield as retail sales continued to grow—along with the potential of increased channel conflict.

Toshiba was a runaway winner when it came to the subcategories of support and partnership, where the company was ranked the best in its category for everything from presales support and training to managing channel conflict and delivering ROI. It only came in second (in a tie with Lenovo) to Panasonic in the postsales support criteria.

Solution providers gave Toshiba generally good grades for reliability—placing the company third in that segment of the Notebook and Mobile Computers category. In fact, the vendor came in third in the product innovation subcategory, behind Panasonic (No. 1) and Lenovo (No. 2). Panasonic walloped the competition in the quality and reliability criteria, earning one of the highest marks in the survey overall: 105. Conversely, the lowest scores for quality were awarded across the board to Acer.

With among the broadest notebook lines in the industry, ranging from value Satellite Pro notebooks with AMD processors to the ultra thin Portege R500—which beat the highly publicized MacBook Air to market by about a year—Toshiba has managed to deliver a complex portfolio without the trappings of IT complexity. According to the data collected from VARs in this year's survey, Toshiba was ranked first, across the board, in every topic under the partnership subcategory. That included criteria such as partner portal, solution provider program, communication and keeping channel conflict at bay—and in a year when retail markets grew, that wasn't necessarily an easy task.

Its product line is nothing to sneeze at, either. For example, Toshiba's Portege M700 tablet notebook (priced at about $1,700) and its Portege R500 (priced closer to $3,000) offer higher-end notebooks at the upper end of the pricing and value scale; the company also thought it was important to offer its channel partners a choice of CPU—and therefore added an AMD-based Satellite Pro to what had previously been an all Intel-based lineup.

During interviews throughout the past year, Toshiba executives have made it clear that the company has emphasized innovation and continued close communication with VARs to deliver functions and features that VARs have said they and their customers needed—as opposed to systems with a lot of features that are unused. Toward that end, in the product innovation subcategory, Toshiba ranked first at providing services opportunities for resellers.

VARs placed a premium on differentiation, too, in this year's survey. The runner-up in this category was Panasonic, which makes the ruggedized and business rugged ToughBook line of notebook PCs—and which received among the highest marks in product innovation criteria this year. That happened in a year in which Panasonic expanded its product line from its traditionally higher-end, pricier lineup to a broader line card spanning both ends of the pricing and feature spectrum.

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