Notebooks: IBM

It wasn’t even close.

IBM’s ThinkPad, in a dominant showing, bested its rivals in five of six technical criteria and seven of nine channel criteria to earn the title of top notebook vendor in this year’s Channel Champions Survey.

IBM won the overall notebook category with a rating of 78.1, beating runner-up Hewlett-Packard’s score of 75.4 and Dell’s third-place rating of 73.6.

IBM has long positioned the ThinkPad line as a technically superior alternative to its rivals in the hotly contested notebook market, and solution providers agreed. IBM’s overall technical satisfaction rating was 85.9, well ahead of runner-up HP with 83 and Dell with 82.3.

IBM’s only stumble in the technical criteria was in the area of price/performance, where it trailed Dell by 2.2 points. However, IBM earned high marks in features, weight, battery life and, perhaps most significantly, product reliability.

Solution providers who partner with IBM said product reliability is a clear differentiator in the notebook market. At the recent IBM PartnerWorld 2005 conference in Las Vegas, Bob Venero, president and CEO of Future Tech, an IBM solution provider in Holbrook, N.Y., poured water onto a ThinkPad keyboard to demonstrate that the IBM machine was impervious to accidental spills. “If I did that to a Dell, it would die,” he said.

IBM’s channel programs and support were equal to the ThinkPad’s technical superiority, according to solution providers surveyed. The company’s composite rating in the nine channel criteria was 72.8, a comfortable lead over second-place HP’s 70.3 and third-place Dell’s 67.8. IBM’s best showing in the survey was in the area of responsiveness to solution provider feedback on channel programs, where it pulled 3.9 points ahead of HP.

IBM yielded the lead in only two channel criteria: total ROI, where it lost to Dell by a mere four-tenths of a point, and managing channel conflict, where Acer eked into first place by a similarly tight margin.

Yet even with such a stellar performance, IBM can’t afford to rest on its laurels. With the pending sale of its PC business, including the ThinkPad line, to Lenovo, the new IBM-Lenovo organization will have to fight to maintain technical excellence and a loyal channel, something the new Lenovo management team has vowed to do.